O’Keeffe eclipses Stieglitz

NEW MEXICO has been attracting artists to its Indian pueblos and moody mountains for about as long as it has been a state—that is, for most of this century. Countless painters and sculptors have been drawn there, and many have settled in places such as Taos. But only one has become an American legend.

Georgia O'Keeffe achieved her exalted status decades before she died in 1986 at the age of 98. The legend began with her art, which was fresh, bold and modern at a time when modernism struck many of her contemporaries as outrageous heresy. Yet her fame owes just as much, if not more, to her life and her character. In the O'Keeffe of the 1920s and 1930s, some American women saw a role model: a woman who defined a plausible alternative to housebound mother and helpmate. When, after their marriage in 1924, she and Alfred Stieglitz moved into their first apartment, which comprised two tiny rooms with a bath in a Manhattan residential hotel, it did not even have a kitchen.

From 1929 onwards, O'Keeffe spent part of each year in New Mexico, without Stieglitz, whose sensuous photographs of his wife are currently on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum*. Eventually, she bought two properties in New Mexico, both of them in the rugged and largely desolate countryside north-west of Santa Fe. In 1949, three years after the death of her husband, himself a great proselytiser for modern art, she moved there permanently.

O'Keeffe was not so much drawn to the state's distinctive Anglo-Spanish-Indian culture as to its stark, dramatic landscapes. She found a spiritual quality in the northern hills and canyons that nourished her, and which she tried to evoke in her paintings. Hers was a solitary personality, averse to self-promotion, but in old age she metamorphosed into a kind of secular saint.

Before she died, people began to talk about creating an O'Keeffe museum. The National Park Service proposed to establish one at her home in the village of Abiquiu. The Santa Fe Opera proposed a similar museum for Santa Fe and the Museum of New Mexico, also in Santa Fe, pondered adding an O'Keeffe wing.

None of these proposals got very far. Then, in 1995, a philanthropic couple—Anne and John Marion, he the former chairman of Sotheby's North America, she the president of the Burnett Foundation of Fort Worth, Texas—announced that they would create a privately funded museum in Santa Fe. They did, and it opened on July 17th. More than 5,000 people turned out to watch Mrs Marion cut the ribbon for the 13,000-square-foot museum, a former adobe church near the city's central plaza that had been converted into a commercial art gallery in 1990. The collection, like the museum, is small—fewer than 90 works in all—although it includes 33 paintings that O'Keeffe had retained during her life.

O'Keeffe fans, and they are legion, can find here samples of her favourite themes, from her early abstractions to flowers, desert landscapes and animal bones, even a few early nudes. If New York subjects are few and far between, this is not surprising. O'Keeffe's reputation owes more to the New Mexico outback than to Manhattan's steel-and-concrete canyons. But is this shrine to O'Keeffe a serious museum or mainly a tourist trap? And even if it is a serious museum, does O'Keeffe's stature as a artist merit this distinction?

Single-artist museums are not common in the United States, even for top-shelf painters. Nowhere in the country will you find a shrine to John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. Indeed, until now, the best-known single-artist institution in America was the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which serves as a cautionary example of why these institutions usually fail to pass muster. Warhol's career, while a significant transitional episode in the history of 20th-century art, is not broad or deep enough to warrant an entire building. A perceptive visitor can absorb everything it has to offer in less than a half hour.

O'Keeffe is different. From her earliest works, the abstract drawings that Stieglitz exhibited in his New York gallery without her knowledge, she was an inventive, lyrical modernist. Early in this century, her uninhibited use of vibrant colour and bold, often startling forms gave American art a powerful shot in the arm. She was an American original who owed nothing to Europe. For that alone, she deserves her reputation, for very few of her contemporaries matched her insight or her daring. Perhaps more than any of them, she made the idea of modern art seem legitimate, and to a popular audience.

All of this was evident in her art before she set foot in the American south-west. Although a self-professed “country person”, she was never a regionalist, and did not become one when she moved from sophisticated Manhattan to back-country New Mexico. Relocation did not change her way of transforming nature into an intense, quasi-mystical experience best appreciated in her large-scale flower paintings.

Her ability to manage a broad range of painting styles, from the most intuitive abstraction to a bold unconventional realism, was another of her strengths. She straddled that divide, the cause of so much contention among artists and critics, comfortably and without self-consciousness. And, in doing so, she proved that aesthetic ideologies should be seen as relative, not absolute.

O'Keeffe the artist deserves whatever recognition she receives from whatever quarter. Her admirers can only hope that the O'Keeffe Museum will hew to a rigorous professional standard, and not evolve into arm of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. Inevitably, some of them will be attracted less by O'Keeffe the painter than by O'Keeffe the woman, a symbol of independent thought and action. They too will have their eyes opened. She was not a radical feminist but a natural, practical one who showed other women that they could function by themselves—and might even prefer to do so.

* “Georgia O'Keefe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz”. Abrams; $60. To be published in Britain in October; £45