Dressing for the Photographer, Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Clothes, curator talk with Dr. Wanda M. Corn

well good afternoon what an amazing day it's been busy and life at the Museum all day long we were to open at 9:00 and we needed to open about 15 minutes early because we already had people lining up outside so really really wonderful to welcome all of you today I'm Patricia McDonald director of the art museum you know when museums thrive when we do well it's because of amazing patrons and incredible members and a community of people that reaches out and comes together and is engaged and comes to Saturday fun Saturday's like today so thank you so much for being here with that acknowledgement please indulge me there were quite a list of people who step forward to help us with the funding for this exhibition shows like this I wish I could tell you that they come at no cost whatsoever but that's not the case and some some it's an impressively long list of people who were so generous to help us so the first the lead sponsors for the Georgia O'Keeffe show are Paula and Barry downing the lavender Family Foundation and Judy Slauson provided additional major underwriting Charles Baker and dr. Denison Ann Ross our principal sponsors the Trust Company of Kansas Fred and Mary Koch foundations Celebrity Cruises and Emprise bank are substantial corporate and foundation sponsors we also receive support from Louise Barron Donna bunk the Devore foundation Erik angstrom and Robert Bell Mary eaves rich and Joey Giblin Norma griever Sonia Greta Minh and Chris Bruner Gridley Family Foundation John and Karen jamming socks on drool angle my candy Michaelis Tama Mindy page will and Kristin price Debbie and Ronson Claire Mary Sue Smith Sarah Smith and the Katy wiedemann foundation and yet we also had sponsorship from museum patrons including Anna Martin Bauer Emily Bonavia dr. John and Nancy Bremer dr. Allen and Sharon fairy Tony and bud gates Trish Higgins rich Richard height and Anita Jones Del Mar America lucky dr. Barry and Jane Murphy Georgia and Keith Stevens Marnie bleed stone and David stone and Sue and Kurt Watson and that's not to forget our standard bears both the Friends of the Wichita Art Museum and the city of Wichita fund all the exhibitions and therefore also the George and Q show so please help me in applause for such and I really need to publicly extend the deepest thanks to the which--it art museum staff we do heroic efforts at this Museum they really pour themselves into the work and in particular the people who spent countless hours the past couple of weeks in the galleries with all it but also all the prep work to get them into the galleries so that's our curator dr. Tara Hendrick who's at the back of the room Kirk I saw floating around oak he's right over here he's imaging an installation manager and Tony Marshall is a preparator and he was floating around here today too they you know if you've been in the galleries it's an incredible show and think of all the different important ways and all the details that it takes to make an exhibition like that Singh cycling to the star of the Wichita Museum I'd say for the weekend but really it's the entire spring and that's Wanda corn a woman that I've known for we don't want to say how many decades at this point and it becomes harder and harder for me to introduce Wanda for many different reasons but in part because her list of accomplishments just keeps piling higher she's not a stranger to the Wichita museum she's been here a number of times in recent years in 2014 she was the wooden lecture here and she actually gave an early lecture as this exhibition was in development so she's she's not giving it a specifically exhibition lecture this time it's it's slightly different Wanda is the Robert and Ruth Halperin professor emeritus from Stanford University she her PhD is from New York University and then she taught at Mills College for a decade and then 30-ish years at Stanford University in introducing her I really need to collapse all her accomplishments and I'm just gonna focus on two things I'm gonna look totally past the seven books that she's written she's already now working on her eighth and I want to focus on her awards and in her scholarships so she is the recipient of distinguished scholar award in 2014 from the College Art Association it you know most of these that I'm about to name and I'm not naming all of them are Lifetime Achievement Awards and to be named the state distinguished scholar by CAA which is the Learning Society for the visual arts is really quite something it means you're a rock star she had received from the same professional association their distinguished teaching of art history award in 2007 she received the Charles Eldridge prize for distinguished scholarship in Americans arts from the Smithsonian she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the visual arts in 2007 for the Women's Caucus for art and she received the Lawrence Wiseman Award for scholarly excellence in the field of American arts history in 2006 from the archives of American Art I'd say you know it's really almost her fair share of Lifetime Achievement Awards at this point but I'm sure they're you know they're professional associations out there still wondering when when to recognize her she's she's revered appropriately for many different reasons but she's a scholar scholar and by that I reflect that the range of her interest of the things that she thinks about and writes about both the depth and the subtlety that she pursues her project is why we think of her as a scholar scholar her major project so exhibitions and and books include she's worked on Andrew Wyeth Grant Wood Gertrude Stein American totalism the women's building in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair when the professional journal the art bulletin which is really the weighty journal for art history when they wanted someone to review assess and critique the status of American art history at that point to whom did they turn Wanda corn of course after roughly two decades of dedicated research she brought forth just an incredible book that was a landmark achievement the great American thing Modern Art and national identity and it won one of the most coveted prizes in our history overall the Smithsonian American Art Museum awarded it and Wanda the Charles C Eldridge prize for distinguished scholarship in American art and because the world is small Charles Eldridge is a premier scholar at the University of Kansas and he has joined us at the back of the auditorium today so you can bump into Charlie at the end of the lecture and he's joined by David cata Forrest who's the other significant American art historian at the University of Kansas so Wanda has just touched so many lives as you can gather from this list of places that she's gone and things that she's done and incredible topics and artists that she's written about and we're about to hear her share some of her wisdom about Georgia O'Keeffe please help me to welcome Wanda back to Wichita as well as to the party thank you very much and thank you again Patricia for that fulsome introduction and I my thanks also did the staff she's already shared them their names with you but it's been wonderful to work with the curator and the installation team here this is not an easy exhibition it's multimedia 3d and 2d it's everything from clothes to photographs to paintings that are hung in ensembles not as tsipras on Rah's and you should know that your museum here has done a fabulous job that competes with the rest of the exhibition venues where this show has been and my lecture today is going to draw upon the O'Keefe exhibition upstairs which if you've been there you'll know it looks like the pictures on the right but I wanted to say that it's had two titles as it turns out one is the original title Georgia O'Keeffe living modern which was the name given to it by me and the Brooklyn Museum which premiered the show but over a couple of venues art image and style came to be one of the preferred titles I actually like it very much and so did Patricia and and Tara who were working with the exhibition here so we have title number two that is in play at your museum as you know it is made up as a painting sculpture photographs but most notably the fresh sort of element is the garments drawn from Georgia O'Keeffe's wardrobe indeed it was my discovery of what she left behind in her closets that stimulated the fresh perspectives that the exhibition brings to the artist the dominant one being the aesthetic unity of her art and her sartorial style another revelation of this show is its demonstration of how carefully she self fashioned herself when she modeled for photographers as she did so often and that is the read that I want to talk to you about today I want to concentrate on O'Keefe and the ways she dressed and posed for photographers it's a little-known fact and I haven't got this statistically down pat but I believe she is the most photographed female artist of the 20th century so let me begin with an image that was on life magazines cover in 1968 a solitary women woman wrapped in black her gray hair in a bun her bowed face profiled against an adobe chimney on a New Mexican rooftop in an empty desert her swaddled body is contained she's drawn into herself not engaged with the photographer nor the camera nor us maybe she is meditating how do you and I know that this is Georgia O'Keeffe not just because it says so in small print under her image but because we as 21st century viewers recognize this visual vocabulary for those of us who keep track of major figures in the arts we have seen so many times before in our newspapers or magazines or books this baroque body the averted eyes the inward gaze the adobe setting and the open skies even the choice of words that the media used to describe O'Keeffe on the cover reinforces this notion of her is something of a Zen mystic the caption stark visions of a pioneer painter the word pioneer conjures up the idea of her as an early practitioner of modernism but also as someone identified with those who came by covered wagon and stagecoach to settle in the open and arid spaces of the American West the words start visions allude to her as something like a saint or a mystic this vocabulary that vote that people were using like magazine was using is also one as a visual vocabulary and it extends and Sekulow Rises the old master iconography of christian saints such as Giovanni Bellinis famous Saint Francis on the upper left seeking kind of st. Francis seeking contact with his God out in the countryside or image drawn from Eastern religions of Buddha's or monks and meditation or nuns in the black and white habits and of course mother Teresa of Calcutta comes to mind as another contemporary figure who's covered head and sun-dried skin has notable similarities to O'Keefe scarfed head black dresses and distant gaze and that's of course at the lower right what I want to explore today is how the application of this loose religious and saintly vocabulary to Georgia O'Keeffe became so firmly rooted in the American imagination how did st. Georgia of the desert become her public persona now what do we mean by persona it's a word we bandy around a great deal these days if we look in the dictionary we find that persona is in fact a word that was only started to be used in the early 20th century and it meant and means mask or public face a persona in other words it's not a fleshed out three-dimensional portrait of a complicated individual but it's visual shorthand that has come to stand for someone personas are created when a stock image is repeated in modern culture that repetition is usually photographic and in the media when someone is given that same pose that same look repeatedly and that becomes her persona or we might say today her trademark or her brand film stars in American culture for example often evolved into persona Marilyn Monroe with her mane of blond hair and her parted juicy lips or Marlon Brando as a tough working-class dude O'Keefe's persona was that of a solitary figure wrapped in black drawn into herself and away from society so what I want to do is two things first I want to explore how photographer is beginning with Alfred Stieglitz her partner invented a visual vocabulary that at first had quite a bit of diversity to it but eventually narrowed itself down to become the st. Georgia persona secondly I want to look at the Artists Agency in the industry of persona building most particularly in the ways she dressed for photographers and how she posed it was she who chose what she was going to wear when she was going to be a model for a portrait session and convinced photographers to picture her with a closed mouth and a serious mean rather than a smile or parted lips this story of how O'Keeffe partnered with portraitists we will see is a fascinating one when I began looking at O'Keefe's wardrobe and was trying to figure out what she was wearing when I looked to photographs of O'Keefe to help me understand her taste and to date her garments one of the first things I noticed was that there was far more variety in her closets than what we see in photographs that pictures of her assert a consistent black less is more aesthetic born into a late Victorian household I learned she never conformed to her mother's conventions of dress she was a rebel dresser well before she became a radical painter as the critic Barbara Rose rightly put it quote Barbara excuse me O'Keefe appears to have been born modern simplicity was always for natural idiom reticence and directness her normal means of expression any quote over the course of her long life and she lived till 90 she was 98 O'Keefe honed a predominantly black and white wardrobe and more outfits that emphasized unbroken silhouettes from childhood on she always opted for plainness over ornamentation she also insisted that her garments be comfortable and functional so she gravitated to rolls capes and wraps that were easy for her to slip into without any assistance she liked pockets to carry her hankies and was drawn to elemental shapes round mother-of-pearl buttons v-neck lines or mandarin collars to use art vocabulary she dressed as if she were an unbroken black and white abstraction moving through space I call this O'Keefe's amazing continuity and in doing that i'm co-opting that nice title from a title that Stuart Davis an abstract painter used for one of his works and I want to give you one telling early example of how she exerted her independence rather than conformed to the dressed codes of her peers on the right is not as she is on the left but on the right you see that what you might call I might call for you the mainstream look from middle and upper class teenage girls when they dressed up for special occasions such as having their photographers done and I believe they're either sisters or twins I'm not quite sure what but it's just such a beautiful photograph in it it helps me make this point that when you got ready for the photographer and you were in high school you wore a white dress with long sleeves lacy bodice and commonly you brushed your hair up into a high pompadour around the face with an oversized black bow at the bottom of your pigtail and that's what you see here these great big things are not here but these are great big fluffy black bows in comparison O'Keefe on the left wears a similar white blouse or dress but is in a plainer version and she has spent no time whatsoever puffing up her hair and adding a bow this became her lifelong pattern she begins with fashion that's ocorant but she then whittled it down to suit her abiding minimalist taste as she put it once in reminiscing from the time I was a little girl if my sisters wore their hair braided I wouldn't wear mine braided if they wore ribbons I would not wear any this independence of dress and lack of traditional femininities continually engendered commentary and one can only imagine what her mother must have thought she never left behind any words but O'Keefe's high school yearbook left behind words describing her this way a girl who would be different in habit dress and style habit style and dress a girl who doesn't give a cent from men and boys still less [Music] I'm gonna quote from a first-person recollection of O'Keefe in high school that helped me recover some of these early habits of dress especially her rejection of ornamentation and this quote comes from again a memoir statement by a classmate of Georgia O'Keeffe's who went to Chatham Hall this is where she graduated from high school in Virginia and this is a sorority photograph from her high school senior year and one of her sorority members vividly remembers when she first walked into the study hall at Chatham and she'd been there for a week or two and also I think had been a student the prior year and O'Keefe was a newbie coming in and when this person said she saw her quote I felt perfectly competent to criticize this late comer especially if she was unusual looking the most unusual thing about her was the absolute plainness of her attire she wore a tan coat suit short severe and loose into this room filled with girls with small waists and tight-fitting dresses bedecked in ruffles and bows pompadours and ribbons vied with each other in size and elaborateness but Georgia's hair was drawn smoothly back from her broad prominent forehead and she had no bow on her head at all only what tiny one at the bottom of her pigtail to keep it from unplanned nearly every girl in that study hall planned right then and there how they were going to dress Georgia up but each plan came to naught for this strong-minded girl knew what suited her and would not be changed though she approved of other girls dressing in frills and furbelows I realize now that Georgia knew her style and type the features you she's discussing event memoirist he that you can see here in this sorority photograph if you just know she is the third one down I've sort of given you I'm giving this away to you but just look who has the tightest sleeves of every single one of those white dresses just try to find who it was that doesn't have one of these sort of big birds hanging on the bottom of their big Tim who is it that has their hair pulled the most severely back with a part even that shows as if to make fun almost of these girls that are all similarly with their hair piled up as Miss O'Keeffe said once in getting back at probably thinking of what she was thought of at the time the girls they're all thought I was pretty strange but I thought they were pretty strange she continued this trait of dressing simply and differently for entire life and whenever you see a picture of her in a group it's specially rewarding to see how she's dressed versus everybody else so here she is here in her plain black dress with a brooch and and you can see the kind of costuming that other people they're all getting an award of one sort or another I note that some of them are wearing corsages I don't think she would have been caught dead with a corsage but in any case they don't all seem to have corsages but you get my point then whenever she was photographed in a group she registered plainness and nonconformity in her mid-20s O'Keefe made her living as an art teacher in Texas and had transitioned from student clothing to adult garb wearing plain on decorated outfits with black widths flat shoes and thick stockings I've been able to determine that she was primarily making her own clothes during this period and she was a superb seamstress with an excellent eye for fabrics insisting upon only the most refined cotton silks and wools that she could find in small-town Texas where she taught her clothes just like in high school continued to be the subject of gossip oh she wore black wrote one woman black black and black and her clothing was all like men's clothing straight lines she didn't believe in lace or ruffles or things like that and quote what God tongues wagging was the public Association of O'Keefe's way of dressing not only with male dress but also suffrage feminism and advocacy for dress reform female dress reform O'Keefe was a as they were called at the time a new woman influenced we know by feminist reform writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman Perkins Gilman's whose writings O'Keefe read and commended to others she was comfortable with her radical dress and could easily flirt as she does here on the right and be a bit sassy when posing for the camera you can even see that she knows how to smile this is how she was dressing when she met Alfred Stieglitz for the first time a meeting and this is she in his photograph of her on the left and himself by another photographer Paul strand on the right this is how she was dressing when she met Stieglitz for the first time a meeting that became probably the most important biographical event in her early life Stieglitz was a photographer a gallerist and activists on behalf of two big causes photography as an art medium and modern art especially American modern art and his galleries if you're in the world of art history you know we're called things like 291 4 291 Fifth Avenue intimate gallery and an American place he was very influential as a public figure in New York and he used his galleries to kick-start careers and promote those artists he believed in just a handful of them but he was fully on their side and helped their careers get launched he was introduced O'Keefe's work while she was teaching in Texas her early watercolors and abstractions and he found it impressive he is said to have said finally a woman on paper he showed some of her pieces in a group exhibition at his gallery 291 and he began a correspondence with her when they met in 1917 Stiglitz had installed a one-woman show of her early work he asked to take let's all she had early work but that's it I just noticed my own looking back here he asked to take her photograph and he made a double of about a half dozen images like the one you have on the left they began to fall in love and in 1918 the following year he issued her an invitation quit teaching come to New York City to paint full-time and pursue a career as an artist and he offered her modest housing you have to know that she was teaching because she did she needed to make a living her family had fallen on hard times and she was using her art skills in one of the very few ways you could use them she had gone to art school for a couple of years and that was to be a teacher of arts first in high schools and then she even ran a small art department in a new Teachers College in Canyon Texas all right so Stieglitz makes her this offer she accepts she leaves her teaching position in Texas and takes up residence in Manhattan Stieglitz who was married at the time unhappily so well had one daughter very quickly thereafter leaves his wife and moves in with Georgia O'Keeffe in 90s in 1918 he finally is able to get a divorce in 1924 so they they live in a very progressive relationship until that time because then he's able to marry and they live together until his death in 1946 he was 60 when they married and she was 37 they were 23 years of difference between them a very important part of their relationship was the epic photographic portrait that he made of her for 20 years and many of the most beautiful of them are upstairs for you to look at for 20 years from 1917 to 1937 she posed and he framed and shot her through his view camera making all in all over the 20 years some three hundred and thirty portraits of her most of them very formal works not snapshots his black her black-and-white wardrobe played well to his black and white film he called the project a continuous portrait and in the first year two years alone he did a hundred studies of her many of them in the nude we won't look at those today because I'm in too close for this particular lecture you may know some of those nude works and they faded away partially because she began to realize they weren't doing her reputation any good and so and and also just for their own relationship it was better that that's that particular way of presenting herself change Stieglitz then not only launched her career as a painter by showing her work in his galleries and getting critics to write about it but he also and this is an important point he created face and body recognition in New York and for art people who were following what he was doing in his galleries he created face and body recognition for his young life by showing his photographs of her his can piece is of his continuous portrait in exhibitions of his work so let's look at a few of those images and I'm coming back this is these are his images but these are his images of other of his artists and I wanted to do to see to see them because what's interesting about them is that he often used this as a kind of staging ground and that is to have one of his artists stand in front of one of their works of art and then he would direct them to look at the camera or look up or whatever but what's unusual about his early portraits of O'Keeffe which are in this particular mode is the way that he inserted her head into her works of art and this is very different from the way he posed male artists Stieglitz took many portraits of the artists in his circle when they visited his galleries each against an artwork behind them when he posed male artists in front of the works they became the works that became murky backgrounds and the same was the true when Steichen posed him in front of his own photographs in 1915 but Wednesday was photographed O'Keeffe in his gallery he had her body interact with the painting behind her her collar in the portrait to the left for example right here if you look how that continues the lines of that abstraction so that it becomes the bottom edge of the painting the V of her dress growing into the shapes in her art in the photograph to the right he asked her to raise her arms being come one come becoming one with her painting her treat her free-flowing hair extending the work below the frame as to her raised arms with its two round patches of body hair in other words he engaged a different body vocabulary for a female artist than the ones he used for the men in his circle and this conformed to his deeply held beliefs that men and women had very different ways of making art finally a woman on paper that it was reflected in that statement Stieglitz's highly gendered gaze has been thoroughly studied so let me just summarize it by saying that when he posed O'Keefe in front of the camera and decided how to crop her body he rather intentionally and I would say respectfully essentialized her as a woman he presented her not just as a modern artist but as a modern female artist and he did this when he talked about and marketed her art to others for instance not only the finally a woman on paper but when he described her in print at one point in 1919 he said women feel the world differently than men feel it the woman receives the world through her womb that is the seed of her deepest feeling mind comes second Stieglitz came up with a typology of poses for O'Keefe that all feminized her some more obviously than others eventually she narrowed this diversity but at the beginning he tried out a variety of poses so that he could find the vocabulary that he wanted for a woman artist for instance it was very commonplace in the early 20th century to think that women were closely allied to nature they were rounded they were organic they were flesh like flowers and fruits so many Stieglitz photographs of O'Keefe aligned her with nature caressing trees holding apples grapes leaves and emphasizing serpentine flowing lines over straight angles also when she self-consciously dressed Manish Lee and that was a word that was popularly used in the 20s acting out her commitment to new womanhood and radical sexual politics he drama traumatized her dedication to non conforming modern dress progressive new women like O'Keefe enjoyed borrowing from male attire and dressing androgynous Lee they were gender benders we might say naughty women experimenting with a unisex law and Stiglitz liked to and perfected this really shoot her from below when she dressed this way creating her as an abstract shape against the sky she's wearing his cape he was a cape wearer in one and a v-neck black sweater in another she instincts were both partial to capes a garment associated with artists since the mid 19th century particularly with artists like the pre-raphaelites in England or Whistler and Oscar Wilde O'Keeffe and Stieglitz used capes in a similar way they presented themselves as they wore them to the outside world they were artists and they broadcast their differences with bourgeois culture but they also use black capes to smooth out the irregular lines of the human body and loosely aligned themselves with the look of ecclesiastical robes so we've given you a little bit of woman artist nature artist modern woman there's one more definition of female O'Keeffe that Stieglitz invented let's call this the mysterious or spiritual or mystical Keith in this variation he more explicitly evoked religious dress such as the ecclesiastical habits with hoods worn by nuns and monks or the covered heads of churchgoers most likely at his direction O'Keeffe covered her head in a shawl her hood and looked away from the camera and focused inward lost in her own thoughts and ruminations having her disengaged from the world around her Stieglitz renders O'Keefe mysterious and unfathomable not in communication with us but folk not with us but with forces outside of ordinary society much like the work still photography did in creating movie stars Stieglitz's portraits promoted O'Keefe's dramatic profile her inexplicable gestures and her black-and-white wardrobe the very same years he was introducing new yorkers to her audacious modern art one consequence was that when art critics wrote reviews of O'Keefe's exit Asians they felt free to comment upon her unusual looks and dress for instance in 1924 a female critic who had known O'Keefe earlier when she had been a student reviewed ER art and then said what a different O'Keeffe she has become she's no longer curly-haired and boyish but an ascetic or most saintly appearing woman with a dead white skin fine delicate features and black hair severely drawn back from her forehead saintly yes but not none like I don't understand that last statement but I quoted to be honest Steve let's would have and then I should just add but when Stieglitz would be asked or when O'Keefe was asked to sit for another photographer for a magazine article that was going to be about here and excuse my Xerox copies here but to make this point this is the best I could do instead of having the staff photographer come by as other people did to do portraits like this of women Stiglitz would say I'll give you the picture I'll be the PR agent in this case you'll use one of my photographs of O'Keefe so you can see how she comes out looking very different from her artistic mates they're on the same page Stieglitz would have liked that description I just gave you as a folk Keefe as saintly and he surely approved of this Arnold Newman photograph of him and O'Keefe that makes the two of them seem so monastic Stiglitz was a talker and he regularly used religious rhetoric to describe the role of artists in modern society he liked to call artist names like evangelists spiritual leaders even priests who had a calling to be society saviors artists missions and his mind were to create modern art that was so uplifting and beautiful that it would cleanse modern culture of it's oppressive materialism Arnold Newman the photographer here knew well Stieglitz his biblical talk everybody did and brilliantly set up his composition to communicate Stieglitz his self defined image as a missionary and he posed O'Keefe much like she appeared in Stieglitz's spiritual woman photographs withdrawn and contemplative Newman photographed them United in one wrapped black body as if spre spiritual brethren in an artistic order both appear grave Stieglitz holds a book as if a cleric might hold a Bible it was in fact a book about himself called America and she sits behind him anchoring the unit and keeping her own counsel well you can see where I'm going by 1944 when this work was done and stickers would just live for two more years some of the ingredients of st. Georgia the mystic the Zen Buddha are already in play but without one essential piece of the puzzle reference to place when Stieglitz photographed O'Keefe he generally generalizes the background that's he generalizes the background or he blurs it or he just makes it a tree or a sky so we really don't know exactly where she has been photographed and this kind of what you might might call place lessness universe Eliza's her as a woman of the world to use or to use his language to her womanís it would be the next generation of photographers who associated O'Keefe's body with the American desert for that part of the story we need to turn to a Keefe's deep affection for New Mexico and to the subtle changes she made in her wardrobe when she went to this new place and we have to turn to photographers who took over from Stieglitz after he hung up his camera in the late 1930s he had a virtual monopoly as you can the exhibition tells the story very well I think over her image for about 20 years and he never went with her to New Mexico so if there was going to be a New Mexico chapter in this continuous portrait that he made of her others were going to have to step in to do the job and that begins in 1924 when she begins to spend summers in northern New Mexico without Stieglitz who stayed behind and where they had commonly gone for the summers to his family compound summer compound at Lake George New York after Stieglitz's death in 46 O'Keefe cleaned up his complicated estate and moved to New Mexico for good where she lived post Stieglitz for another 40 years until her own death in 1986 over time she bought two properties the earliest and the smaller of the two at ghost ranch and that's what you see here on the right that's a painting of this home this is the home you're in the courtyard of it and this is the home from the outside looking in the other direction with the famous mountain called the Pedernales she painted so very very often and that she sometimes called the mountain in her backyard and you can see why in that image so that was her first sometimes referred to this is her summer cottage and eventually she and when she moved there for good had acquired and a piece of property with an old Hacienda foundation on it and created a much larger home and grounds in a nearby village some 15 miles from Ghost Ranch Abiquiu is much larger property which afforded her the opportunity to have gardens and orchards trees that grow flowers and become quite a professional or I should say sort of a sustainable gardener because she liked to do make garden enough so that she could have her own vegetables to eat all summer long when she began to go to New Mexico she had become an experienced model and in New York she was a very well-known model because of what Stieglitz had done with his portrait of her she had learned by then how well her minimalist black and white clothing translated in black and white film and she never warmed to color film which is why there's so little color in the exhibition upstairs fact she asked photographers to only photograph her black and white she learned how to be comfortable striking dramatic poses with the tutelage that she went through under Stieglitz she'd learned not to smile or show her teeth when being photographed and most importantly she had figured out which photographic poses of Stieglitz she liked best she did not like the ones that overly feminized her she didn't want anymore pictures of her in the nude and she did like those that made her appear serious thoughtful and expressive she had a preference in other words for poses of the mystic and the spiritual type she had also learned the photographs circulating through exhibitions and the media had become powerful tools for projecting her artistic identity for creating a persona very few if any of her contemporaries had this kind of PR support in building their careers with 20 years of experience she now entered into what I would describe as artistic partnerships with a younger generation of cameramen who was soon as Stiglitz stopped making photographs contacted her and traveled to the west-southwest photograph her she continued to dress in black and white but she began to add new accessories such as long white scarfs and wide brim black gaucho her Vaquero they're not really American cowboy hats but more like the felt cowboy hats that the artists in Mexico and and Central and America wore as she's wearing here that's probably the same hat I thought at first she had many hats but if you look at how beat-up that hat up in is in the exhibition I'm now come to think and then she starts wearing you'll see some more beat-up hats the hat gets beat up and she never stops wearing it so I've come to think she me of it one of these hats and word for the most of her adult life so she's wearing them here for Philip Halsman who was a New York fashion and society photographer and he'd come to Ghost Ranch in 1948 building on what Stiglitz had begun O'Keefe easily fell into unsmiling poses and the photographer instead of posing her as an abstract mass against the sky portrayed her seated in her own adobe courtyard with her collections of bleached bones and River smooth rocks indeed halls men's portraits play up both the strangeness and the beauty of a New Yorker because she was still living in New York now like O'Keefe dressed in her black suit who's chosen to trade in skyscrapers and neon lights for Adobe Red Cliffs and collections of desert artifacts he gives O'Keefe a brand new context a specific indigenous landscape and architecture after Halsman came others who helped to reinvent O'Keefe as a regionalized mystic Jorge Daniel in 1952 or Yosef karsh in 56 posed her as serious and sphinx-like just a Stieglitz ed but geographically rooting her as he had never done they viewed her here as a kind of strange priestess or meditative nun surrounded by things that were commonly understood as signifiers of the American desert she was no longer as Stieglitz had rendered her a universal woman but an artist of the American West in a rare composition in color photography taking one of her easels and a completed painting out of doors Toni Vacarro the photographer drew a relationship between her art her arid landscape and her rapt body and I'm gonna tell you something about the wrapped body the black dress in just a second but I might tell you a cute story that Toni Vaqueros 95 or 96 right now and he still remembers what turned out to be a week-long shoot of O'Keefe parsec if she wouldn't let him shoot for the first three or four days because she had one in him the magazine he was working for to go get pictures from the photographer's I just showed you Yosef Karsh and Halsman and so on and she didn't like photographing for brand new people as whose reputation she didn't know anything about so I asked him how and really this is the photograph he needed to get because this is what the magazine wanted a colored picture of the female artist in front of her earth that this is his mission and when he finally got it he got it in color and I said to him well how did you do that because she didn't like color photography and he said well by then we to become buddies I had made spaghetti for her but karo he's an Italian I had garden for her I pulled weeds I picked the lettuce and I had become okay in her eyes so he said when I finally suggested we take an easel outside because he wasn't getting the picture he was sent to take he was taking other pictures but not this one she had she had warm to him and said okay but he wore several cameras over his neck and he just said he would pick take one take a picture and that's it not quite right now pick up another camera and she of course wasn't conscious your back was to him for starters of exactly which camera he was using and little did she know but one of them maybe more than one of them was loaded with color film because that was also part of his mission to get a color picture not a black and black and white so thus this this very famous photograph but I want to tell you something about the little black dress that she donned for the very first time for mccarroll because it became her go-to outfit for the next 25 years of posing this is a commission of 1960 she wore these wrap dresses until her death in 86 her adoption of it as a uniform underlines the degree to which O'Keeffe was not a passive sitter but a strong-willed partner in the making of the persona that the media constructed she exerted her agency in multiple ways this garment was a little different from the black suits she had been posing in regularly and these are two more Tony Vacarro photographs it was basically a cotton wrapper with a very wide skirt that she gathered together with a belt it had a lot of material in it and was something like a cinched kimono except it had narrow sleeves and a shorter hemline it had no fasteners no buttons nor a zipper and it was very plain she simply had to put it on like a coat wrap it around her belt the dress with a favorite Mexican accessory by hectare Aguiar and often she warrant her Alexander called her pin at the v-neck the viche at the bottom of the V at her neckline and she accessorized her head with a variety of Western styled hats and scarves well to tell you just a bit more because this was one of the great stories that I felt I had to crack in making this exhibition and writing the book because I know of something like 26 wrap dresses that were in her closets so clearly this was a very important costume for her and I was able with the help of a research assistant to discover that it was called at the time a popover dress or a pyramid dress and it was not at all Diane von Furstenberg shrapp dresses of the 1970s but rather it was the invention of a designer called Claire McArdle and it was so popular that simplicity put out a pattern for the dress in 1951 O'Keeffe we know purchased her first ones from Neiman Marcus her versions were a little simpler than McArdle's McArdle's were tended to be blind and they had matching belts and the ones she bought from Neiman Marcus and this in fact I believe the pink one up there is a Neiman Marcus we're online very simple nice Cotton's and nice colors and once she decided that this suited her she then figured out a way and if you go back you can see oh maybe it's the next one she she had a pattern for made for one of these and she could just take it to a seamstress and I talked to two seamstresses who made her wrap dresses and ordered them up in one other color or fabrics she she wanted the black ones the ones are the ones that she usually wore for photographers but we do know from what was left in the closet and what you see upstairs that she also had several in colors she liked the black dress because it was comfort her the rack dress because it was comfortable and then had it's it's shared features with robes and kimonos and she could easily slip into it it looked and felt right in the warm weather of New Mexico and I'll just tell you that that simplicity pattern when it's made looks just like this for those of you who know sewing we bought seven yards to make this it's cut on the bias there's a lot of cloth I feel like a little 1950's like I should have a starched slip under this and remembering back to the days of the 1950's in any case my research assistant made this dress for me and we made one for herself as well which is very fun so as she aged let's go back to as O'Keefe age she suffered from masculine macular degeneration but he and here she is wearing her wrap dresses and or in one case she actually donned a kimono kimonos worth what she wore in the house not out of doors but we have one single formal for portrait of her in the kimono and you see that upstairs that's done by Bruce Weber but anyway here she is in her wrap dress and ordered the kimono falling into that solemn pose which had become commonplace what had started in Stieglitz's photographs and gone Western with Halsman and Kirsch became a standard grammar for those making portraits of the artist in her late life so to return to the Life magazine cover with which I began this talk when I asked John lone guards to live the magazine photographer who made this image for life what it was like to work with O'Keeffe he told me she needed no coaching O'Keeffe he said took this st. George opposed instinctively like a pro he added that it was she who suggested climbing the ladder on the roof where she took her canonical position against dobe chimney personae as i said at the beginning of my talk never reveal the whole person they are not three dimensional beings who get and have bad hair your hair days or can laugh and cry rather they move around in American culture in a packaged look a guy's a formula that stands in for the person pop artists like David Bradley a Santa fan Native American artists represented here nervous about celebrities and he made a number of portraits like the one here treating O'Keefe's persona with humor and irony and admiration in his own pop way he grasped that her art her black wrap dress her withdrawal into nature and her engagement with place were the basic ingredients of her st. Georgia of the desert persona some of Bradley's humor resides in his self conscious replay of another celebrity image that of whistlers mother of his stoic mom wearing black widow weeds and seated alone in her surrounds for eternity and it's also witty to imagine the artists as stiffened unlike working alone in a stylized desert a kind of westernized mother Teresa though O'Keefe was still alive when Bradley painted his image O'Keefe didn't pose for him nor did she need to he could easily draw upon the huge image Bank the artists had spawned over half a century but she did pose for this late life image by George Mobley a staff photographer for National Geographic who captured what you might call the uber thesis of my book and exhibition and that is that O'Keeffe had but one aesthetic that she projected not only in her paintings but also in her dress her homes and her sessions with professional photographers in this wonderful late portrait the colors and strong outlines of the artist profile and her clothed body repeat those in the painting that of a place she called the black place to the right even the way O'Keeffe angles her cane anchors the grey zigzagging ravine that cuts down the middle of the painting there's such perfection here in visualizing a symbiosis between O'Keefe's body and her painting that I asked George Mobley now retired and living in Panama how he got the shot and where did he find such an uncluttered wall he he wrote me that he was on assignment taking shots for a National Geographic book on the American Southwest he was assigned to photograph O'Keefe and she had agreed to have him visit her at Ghost Ranch they had coffee together Mobley told me and as they spoke he was impressed by the stark graphics of the view in her living room meaning the minimalist walls without much on them he said he's simply told her I'll pen as she said where did would you like to photograph me and he said sit there and I quickly took a few photographs that was all there was to it he was not there long but long enough to sense the connective tissue between her painting her dress and her minimally decorated home the photograph he continued won a prize in a national press photographers contest but he never saw the artist again O'Keefe played a role in arranging her face and body for Mobley's camera by dressing starkly and then easily falling into poses where she looks away from the camera and suppresses any hint of a smile she learned those lessons first from Stieglitz and then she made them her lifelong protocols O'Keefe had vehemently disliked Stieglitz's essentializing of her as a woman artist and the way that he gendered her but she liked being calibrated as a serious artist whose missions what mission was to live in her mind work hard and bring beauty and poetry into a difficult world so one thing I hope you take away from my talk tonight as well as the exhibition upstairs is that O'Keefe exerted agency in the making of her image Bank and the construction of her meditative persona her Zen self I would even go so far to say that painting was her most important art form but modeling for the camera was another and I would add self fashioning to her skill set when photographers came to call O'Keefe was as deliberative a deliberative a modern composure of her body as was a modern painter on canvas by studying her clothes and then portraits of her wearing those clothes as we do in this exhibition I hope I have expanded her expressiveness as an artist in every aspect of her life Georgia O'Keeffe lived dressed and painted modern thank you very much

Channel: Wichita Art Museum

Views: 6,464

Keywords: Wichita Art Museum, WAM, Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keefe, O'Keeffe, O'Keefe, flower painter, painter, O'Keeffe Museum, fashion, Wanda Corn, Brooklyn Museum, National Endowment for theArts, NEA, Modernist

Id: 5EUw-fC0hMw

Length: 60min 41sec (3641 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019