On the Spiritual in Art

It was in 1916 and it was in May. The legend of Georgia O’Keeffe was just to be born, in the small attic gallery called 291, in the corner of 5th Avenue and 31st Street in Manhattan, as Stieglitz was eagerly hanging 10 of her abstract charcoal drawings, on his gallery wall.

These drawings represented to Stieglitz everything he had ever strived for with 291: “honesty of aim, honesty of self-expression, honesty of revolt against the autocracy of convention”.

Besides, they represented a woman who finally had dared to express herself on paper. Just a few months earlier, O’Keeffe had read and begun to apply the ideas in Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, from 1914. The consequences this book would prove to have on her art, she could hardly have anticipated.

O’Keeffe, as an artist in the limelight, stretches over a span of seventy years, up until 1986, when she passed away at 98. She was a productive artist, nearly all the way to the end, but she seems to have been difficult to place in any particular compartment, and the critique of her art has been both good and bad. She has been called ‘luminist’, ‘transcendentalist’, ‘minimalist’ or ‘precisionist’. ‘Free of style’, also ‘instinctively modern’, at some time ‘surrealist’ or just ‘abstract artist’, but none of these epithets seem precise enough, not even in combination. They describe styles and deal with “HOW” and do not reach her core.

In many paintings, perhaps especially seen in the earliest abstracts in both charcoal and color, she was expressing a special force. A visually vibrant symbolicism seems to be speaking from another dimension of awareness. This feeling, a peaceful and pure mood in spite of sometimes violently dramatic combinations of color, puts the susceptible observer in a state of wonder and awe, and quenches a sort of thirst you may not even have known was there.

The absence of cynicism and anecdotic storytelling is liberating.

So who was Georgia O’Keeffe before this life of fame?

Books:

Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years

Canyon Suite. Early watercolors by GEORGIA O’KEEFFE. With an afterword by Charles C. Eldredge.

Republished by Old Post Promoter

• Artists Psychology Here's an interesting exclusive article Roland d’Humières, 56 years old psycho-analyst from Aix en Provence (France) has written for our Weblog. I think it to be a very interesting writing about the artists psychology, or maybe "arts psychology", what's behind an artists mind. Artists Psychology Whatever is his/her Art, painting,......
• Gothic Art Antiques -> Decorative-Arts Gothic art refers to any art, whether it’s a painting, a sculpture, or some other medium, created from about the mid-12th century through the end of the 14th century. Art was still created over the next century that’s often called International Gothic, but this type of art......
• On Canvas Art Charles Veilleux wrote this exclusive article for us. Charles is the owner of Veilleux Fine Art. On May 31, 2009, Veilleux Fine Art transitions into a private artist studio tour business. Charles has owned and operated contemporary art galleries in Santa Fe since 1993. On Canvas Art Art a term......
• Bruce Lee Movies Collectibles -> Memorabilia -> Movie Memorabilia Bruce Lee is a revered name in the martial arts community, and Bruce Lee movies are classics among action and martial arts fans. Lee was more than actor, he actually developed a martial art form called Jeet Kune Do, and popularized the sport in......