Bee Stings and Art in the Spring

They say it's springtime although it doesn't feel much different here in Southern California. The hills get a little greener for a couple months.  In other parts of the country, they are not sure it's spring either.   It is still cold and people are yearning to see the daffodils start to break through the snow.  It is a time of renewal.  Flowers bloom and animals have babies.  We rifle through our belongings determined to put forth a fresh outlook to remain organized.

We think of flowers when we think of spring.  Flowers make me think of Georgia O'Keeffe.  Flowers have long been a favorite subject for paintings. Some of the most popular art that we sell includes photographs of flowers, floral paintings, and fine art prints of such favorites as roses, magnolias, poppies, sunflowers and tulips. The Impressionists had a long-standing love affair with flowers and gardens in their art.

Probably no other artist celebrated the bloom like Georgia O'Keeffe. Flowers are her earliest memory growing up in Wisconsin on a dairy farm.

“Most people in the city rush around, so they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”- Georgia O'Keeffe

Eighty years ago when Georgia began her career, women were not recognized in the art world. She grew up poor.  She received her formal art education at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League in New York City.  She worked as a teacher but continued to paint when she had time.

I remember being taught that her work often contains a vaginal motif. It never occurred to me until then and now is really not hard to notice. I also took a horticulture class for orchids once and was amazed at how much sex was involved in pollination   

O'Keefe creates an image of the female form that is erotic and sensual, not degrading or demeaning. It would be difficult for someone to look at her paintings and alter the concept of the female form from a naturally beautiful being to an object. Her paintings, while depicting only a vaginal motif, do not allow the viewer to reduce the female form. I now have a whole new appreciation for the work. 

“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. 

Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. Years later, many continue to dismiss her as a prissy painter of pretty pictures or, I should say, pretty genitalia. Even when hailed for being “the most famous and highly paid woman artist in America,” she gets saddled with a qualifier.

I am always amazed at how far we have come as women. It took activism to allow women to show their work in galleries. The MoMA honored O’Keeffe with a retrospective in 1946. It was one of its first solo shows for a woman. She had her haters. A critic said her work was “little more than tinted photography.” She threatened male artists (sex was their territory!) Edward Hopper and John Sloan were “furious” that she’d been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949 and “tried to intervene.”

In 1921, some photos of Georgia that were taken by her husband included some nudes. He became quite famous for them and said “When I make a photograph I make love.” O’Keeffe, who later recalled the “heat and excitement” of the photo sessions, opined that “nothing like them had come into our world before.”  She was a woman ahead of her times for sure.  She reminds me of my own mother.  She did what she wanted to do but it came with a price.

Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.

Yet the same nude photos triggered a backlash against O’Keeffe. Forever after, her work was seen in purely sexual terms. That would have never been an issue if she had been a man.  That probably would be no big deal in 2014.

When the flowers do start coming peeking through the ground, take a moment and think about Georgia and her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist.  She was an intense woman but felt the bee sting of social circles in the art world.

- Renee Bangerter