Georgia O’Keeffe Finally Arrives in Europe

It is the end of a warm Parisian September when an architect friend, in town for a few days, vehemently urges me: “Go see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at Pompidou Center. You’ll love it!”

The peremptory, thrilled tone of her advice suggests that the event is exceptional. She is right: this is the first retrospective in France devoted to Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986). What makes it all the more extraordinary is that the artist is a rather unusual presence in museums throughout Europe. One of the most influential modernist painters and America’s most well-known female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe is almost entirely unknown to European viewers. The curiosity she raises is tangible: a long queue, uncommon for a weekday, unfurls outside the Pompidou.

Outside the museum, a gigantic fuchsia flower on a billboard seems to invite people from afar. Inside, the exhibition space is fluid. It is organized in sections corresponding to different periods of O’Keeffe’s life and artistic evolution, throughout which one can freely move.

The exhibit starts with O’Keeffe’s early water-color Nudes, the only works where the female body is explicitly represented. The sensuous shapes and the glassy colors of the nudes recall the erotic drawings of Auguste Rodin, which she discovered in 1908 at 291, an art gallery in Manhattan managed by her future husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Some of Rodin’s drawings are juxtaposed with O’Keeffe’s, thus composing an unpredicted, harmonious combination.

*Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932.*

Proceeding to the left, the immersion in O’Keeffe’s magnetic plant world begins with a beguiling series of three paintings of flowers. The trio has an unsettling, hypnotizing power. The colors are bright, cold, and intense. The allusions to femininity, although more rarefied than those of the watercolors, are extraordinarily powerful. The female anatomy merges with the botanical and the geographical ones. Petals take the form of hips, pistils blossom in the middle of concentric folds, as winding and sinuous as hills or thighs.

Georgia O’Keeffe, *The Shelton with Sunspots*.

On a wall on the right side of the gallery, the flowers expand on the canvas and grow gigantic. Inspired by the blow-up photography techniques, their magnified dimensions express O’Keeffe’s perception of the city, the vertiginous feeling conveyed by the giant proportions of New York’s skyscrapers.

The White Flower n. 1 represents an enormous Jimson weed, a night-blooming flower O’Keeffe grew at her home before learning it was poisonous. The flower emanates an aura of bewitching danger, emphasized by the close-up framing. In the novel Real Estate, British writer Deborah Levy recounts how the winter blooms at a stall outside Shoreditch High Street Station in London reminded her of O’Keeffe’s flowers. Levy argues that “they looked as if they had stopped breathing under the scrutiny of her gaze.” The gigantic Jimson weed indeed conveys an idea of immobility, like a predator holding breath before attacking.

As O’Keeffe’s personal life unfolds through her work, the landscape changes from urban New York to desolate, raw New Mexico. Yearning for a place of her own, after years of research, in 1940 she purchased an isolated property called Ghost Ranch in Albuquiù. This period is all about orange and pink mountains, mesas, and imponent cliff walls that replace New York’s high-rising buildings. The paintings reproduce the artist’s relationship with the vast, silent New-Mexican sceneries. Like My Front Yard, Summer 1941, some of them portray colorful expanses of mountains and craters. Others stir towards an unsettling abstraction, where goats’ skulls and rams’ horns float in the air as if they were under a spell.

The exhibition ends on notes of altitude and elevation, with paintings portraying natural elements seen from above, inspired by O’Keeffe’s first plane rides later in her life.

Considered one of the founding figures of modern art, O’Keeffe has always benefited from broad artistic recognition in the United States. Artistic legitimization for a painter is inevitably bound to space, and so has been O’Keeffe’s. In 1943 she gained her first retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1946, she became the first woman to earn a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The first catalog of her work was edited by the Whitney Museum of American Art in the mid-1940s. Yet, she was not afforded the same artistic (and spatial) recognition in Europe. The Tate Modern in London only consecrated its first solo exposition to her work in 2016, emphasizing how rare and exclusive the occasion was.

Whether due to chauvinism, sexism, or her bold independence from European artistic canons and distinctive American identity, O’Keeffe had been left at the margin of Europe’s art scene until today.

As the exposition draws to a close, the transition from the exterminated, mystic spaces of New Mexico to the crowded bookshop of the Pompidou Center is somehow abrupt. Books about O’Keeffe, postcards, posters, and even a children’s coloring book are on full display on the shelves. A thought inevitably comes to mind: suddenly, an artist previously almost unknown in Europe now occupies the temple of European modern art and the collective imaginary of its public. Finally, a female artist conquers a physical and virtual space that has been precluded to her for decades.

Pompidou’s retrospective not only gives O’Keeffe the international appreciation she deserves but also functions as the posthumous possibility for her material and symbolic reappropriation of cultural space.

Editor’s Note:

The Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition discussed is a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe. The exhibition is currently showing at the Fondation Beyeler until the 25th of May, 2022.

Aida Marrella is a Ph.D. researcher based in Paris. An avid reader and a city life lover, she has a penchant for women's writing and flânerie.

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