Trees
The relationship with Stieglitz was in trouble in 1926. According to Peters, he had an affair, and she views Georgia’s tree, The Old Maple, as humanlike, almost scary; as a big fallic shape indicating an uncontrollable, sexual passion.
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The Old Maple, 1926The tree looks as if it would be yelling and barking too; not a nice figure to have to deal with. The year before, Georgia had painted a similar tree, but with a much more sensual appeal, in a romantic, pink palette. |
Stieglitz actually liked to identify himself with trees on his property, and it could be that those trees are a visual barometer for Georgia’s emotional life in the relationship, as Peters suggests. Some trees are even named after actual people:
The Lawrence Tree from 1929.
She painted this during a visit to D. H. Lawrence near Taos, New Mexico. View it from any angle.
There was a long weathered carpenter’s bench under the tall tree in front of the little old house that Lawrence had lived in there. I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree… past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
John Ruskin and the Romantic movement, put a name on the concept of “pathetic fallacy“, which means that human feelings are projected onto non-human objects, like for example a tree. One known example of “pathetic fallacy” is Johan Christian Claussen Dahl’s Birch in a Storm from 1849, depicting a birch tree hanging on for dear life to the steep cliff where it grows.
According to Rosenblum, there are more empathic trees within Romanticism. Mondrian paints trees like “cosmic mirrors of an organic vitality, so powerful, that it can change roots, stem, branches into a vibrating web in a transitory state between spirit and matter“.
O’Keeffe’s trees, leaves, even flowers and other motifs often contain this human and personal quality.
Books and links
Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century
The Pathetic Fallacy: A Lecture Delivered at the Library of Congress on May 7, 1
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