Wednesday, Jan. 28, 1998

O'Keefe and Texas

San Antonio exhibit celebrates state's influence on renowned painter

By DEBORAH MARTIN
Staff Writer

   SAN ANTONIO -- Georgia O'Keefe is closely identified with New Mexico, where she spent the last 37 years of her life and where a museum dedicated solely to her work opened last summer.
   But she called Texas her ``spiritual home.'' And it was in Texas --where she lived for just four years early in her career -- that she came into her own as an artist.
   Though O'Keefe never set foot in the state again after she left for New York in 1918, she returned to it often in her work. That fact inspired ``O'Keefe and Texas,'' which opens today at the McNay Art Museum.
   ``Those were critical years,'' said McNay Director William J. Chiego of her time in Canyon and Amarillo. ``During those years, in her late 20s, she came to maturity as an artist and began to discover herself and nature.''
   He started pulling together ``O'Keefe and Texas'' more than two years ago, when he decided to build a show around five of her works that are in the museum's permanent collection. He hit on the idea of focusing on her time in the Lone Star State after studying two paintings. ``Evening Star V'' is a 1917 watercolor, and ``From the Plains'' is a burst of oranges and yellows arcing across a canvas she painted in 1953 in memory of her Panhandle years.
   Chiego began to wonder why she was still painting Texas nearly 40 years after she had left.
   That question drove him to seek O'Keefe works and research from private collectors and 30 art institutions, including those as close as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and as far afield as the National Gallery in Canada.
    Background
   O'Keefe first came to Texas in 1912 to be the supervisor of art in the public schools in Amarillo. She immediately fell in love with the expanses of the plains, the dramatic light and the rich colors -- all of which would influence her later work.
   ``I couldn't believe Texas was real,'' she recalled in a 1960 interview. ``When I arrived out there, there wasn't a blade of green grass or a leaf to be seen, but I was absolutely crazy about it. There wasn't a tree six inches in diameter at that time. For me, Texas is the same wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.''
   O'Keefe spent two winters in Amarillo, and returned to Texas for two more years in 1916. She headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M) in Canyon during her second stay.
   Most of ``O'Keefe and Texas'' focuses on the work she produced while she lived in the state. There are also some pieces that she painted later which recall that time, either thematically or stylistically.
   Major attention is still paid to her and her work because, ``first of all, in American art, she was the first woman artist to really gain prominence and significance,'' said Professor Carey Rote, who teaches art history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. ``And she did maintain a level at the same level of the men artists around her.''
   Even so, she was treated differently than the men. When she painted her over-sized flowers, critics wrote about the sensuality of the work, Rote noted. When a man did something similar, it didn't strike the critics as at all sexual.
   ``As far as her imagery, she really opened up the boundaries. She worked in both realism and abstraction so we see both levels and tendencies,'' Rote said.
   That's the key to understanding O'Keefe's work, Chiego said.
   She would paint something precisely as it appeared, then she would strip that same image down to its barest essence. Chiego cited two works that have been hung beside each other in the McNay show -- ``From the Patio I'' from 1940 and ``Wall with Green Door'' from 1952 -- as examples. The first is a literal translation to canvas of a patio; the second has broken that image down to nothing more than squares and rectangles bracketed by narrow bands of color.
   For some people, O'Keefe touches a chord not so much because of her accomplishments as an artist, but because of how she lived her life.
   ``Those who are familiar with her name know that she represents a maverick female modernist who bucked the New York art scene,'' said William G. Otton, director of the South Texas Institute for the Arts in Corpus Christi. ``She pursued her career in a very removed way from the standard marketplace and gained the recognition and admiration of the general public, which includes the art community.
   ``In other words, she just did it her own way. And people are curious about those special individuals in American culture who seem to the exception rather than the rule and survive it with great integrity, right to the end.''
   The McNay exhibit touches briefly on her life, but it mainly lets her work speak for itself.
   The timing of the show coincides with a surge of interest in O'Keefe that followed the opening of the new Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M.
   The explosion of publicity that heralded its opening last July has brought scores of people to New Mexico to see her work. Administrators had projected 150,000 would step across the museum's adobe threshold in the first year. By Jan. 1, more than 202,000 had already seen the museum's holdings.
   The exhibit at the McNay will almost certainly benefit from that success, Chiego said. He expects about 100,000 people to see the show; several thousand tickets have already been sold.
   No matter how much excitement the Texas show generates among O'Keefe's fans, though, it will not be loaned to other museums. Some of the watercolors are too fragile to endure that much handling. One is so delicate that visitors must lift a velvet curtain to view it.
    Why are people still talking about O'Keefe?
   In addition to the Santa Fe museum, the current hunger for O'Keefe might also be chalked up to a couple of larger trends.
   ``There has been a re-evaluation of how 20th century art has evolved, and the idea of reducing art to pure form is being revisited,'' Otton said. ``Those artists that used the formalist approach to artmaking, yet still employed the subject, are being looked at a lot more carefully. And she (O'Keefe) is one of those anchor people that fits right into the modernist movement.''
   Rote speculated that part of the interest may stem from fresh attention being paid to women artists whose achievements were eclipsed by those of their husbands or lovers.
   The interest in O'Keefe, she said, is similar to that in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo a few years ago, and the budding resurgence of interest in Maria Izquierdo. Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera; Izquierdo was the companion of Rufino Tamayo; and O'Keefe was married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
   ``People are trying to focus on these women artists and to recognize what their contributions were, if they made contributions that were equal to or greater than their companions,'' she said. ``Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo was one of the main thrusts in that direction.''
   The flurry of publicity that has been granted each of those artists has had a small impact on contemporary female artists, she said, but not much of one.
   ``It's still a struggle,'' she said. ``And it's a greater struggle for a woman as an artist than it is for a man.''