In Lust with Georgia O'Keefe

As a child growing up in New Mexico, my grandfather would tell me about a marvelous female painter who settled in the Santa Fe desert and painted only large vivid flowers and animal bones. I again learned of her work in high school, where it was condensed to a small paragraph in a art history book. Georgia O' Keefe planted her roots in the vast and ghostly desert of New Mexico for the last many years of her life but was infamous world-wide for her feminist abstract art. Her paintings were erotic by nature, and throughout her life she was criticized for her controversial floral images, often depicting enchanting vulva forms. People are often pulled away from her paintings because of the "debate" about their meanings or what they suggest. Were the flowers a symbol of her sexuality? the cycles of birth, death and decay? or just a depiction of nature as she saw it up close and personal?


here is a great article from New York Magazine about the "controversy" of her erotic imagery(or perceived to be erotic imagery). When I look at her work, I see prismatic sensuality, and beauty for what it really is up close and personal. O'Keefe herself seemed to be upset with the stigma given to her art by the art community as well as her fans. Her art was not taken seriously when it was labeled as "pretty" or "girly" rather than imaginative and revolutionary. “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.


What I love about her work is her incredible ability to capture the essence of stunning vistas and landscapes, excluding human forms and painting only flora and fauna with sun-baked browns and reds, gradation of pastels and depth-less desert forms. What she painted is beauty or, as she called it, "the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." Despite the sexual girly stigma given to her work she never stopped painting. She was also the first female artist to have her art up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946. She was a woman ahead of her time.

She was the wife, cuckold and camera-object for America's great modernist Alfred Stieglitz. She moved into the New Mexico desert and lived a long full life there until 1988, she died at 88.

Recently while visiting family in New Mexico, I went to the museum dedicated to her life and work- The Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, which is what inspired me to write about her.