Overlook, for those who can, what you assume you already know about Georgia O’Keeffe. Do not forget that American artwork within the Nineteen Fifties was extra than simply Summary Expressionism. And contemplate that Abiquiú, New Mexico, has identities and histories of its personal.
Along with his ebook Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work, Randall C. Griffin contributes to the greater than 150 monographs and biographies which were written concerning the famed artist, setting his sights on her lesser-known post-war profession. The ebook distinguishes itself by specializing in the works O’Keeffe created from the mid-Forties to the early ʼ80s (she died in 1986 at age 98) by the lenses of biography, gender, class, race, and modernity, relative to the New York Faculty.
Although I’ve at all times been skeptical of O’Keeffe’s attract, my curiosity within the ebook was piqued by the writer’s readings of the artist’s work alongside strains of sophistication and race. Griffin, a professor of Artwork Historical past at Southern Methodist College, reveals that O’Keeffe was decided to create a spot of her personal within the village of Abiquiú, established as Tewa Pueblo land centuries in the past, and interprets her collection of over 20 summary, geometric patio work as a “negotiation of identity” and a solution to “defin[e] herself in opposition to her neighbors.”
Ebook cowl of Randall C. Griffin, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work (2025)
Probably the most reductive of the collection is “My Last Door” (1952–54), with its nonnaturalistic palette of black, white, and grey. The door stays inaccessible, and the partitions insurmountable. Griffin’s main and secondary analysis — together with a consideration of the villagers’ vantage factors from each outdoors O’Keeffe’s courtyard partitions and inside them as home employees — informs his account of Whiteness at work in these work, which he proposes will be “seen in part as acts of erasure and possession.” This studying is supported by O’Keeffe’s personal declare: “That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.”
Griffin’s footnotes present useful insights, resembling these of Napoleón Garcia, a member of the Genízaro Abiquiú neighborhood who labored on and off for O’Keeffe for years. Notably, he notes that she was “indifferent to the plight of the poor,” which Griffin describes as “the most damning account of her.” Nevertheless, he contains counterpoints as nicely, resembling accounts of the prosperous O’Keeffe’s substantial donations to the neighborhood for an elementary college, a gymnasium, and residential water for cleansing and consuming.
Within the chapters that comply with, Griffin addresses O’Keeffe’s highway work and different views from the massive image home windows she put in in her home, resembling “Winter Road I” (1963). He particulars how her work of rivers and canyons reveal influences from her worldwide travels and trace at her environmental issues, and means that her clouds and sky work had been knowledgeable by Zen Buddhism and her personal mortality and loss. Within the closing chapter, O’Keeffe’s lack of her central imaginative and prescient as a consequence of macular degeneration led her deeper into formal abstraction — tactile pots, bronze sculptures, work of rocks — and, ultimately, to hiring studio assistants to make her work. Her fascination with repeatedly portray the Washington Monument in a collection usually known as From A Day with Juan (1976–77) remains to be misplaced on me, although Griffin convincingly humanizes the artist and her conceptual and formal pursuits in his evaluation.
I’m on no account an skilled on O’Keeffe. A number of the similar issues that drew her to create a life for herself in New Mexico, nonetheless, additionally attracted me: mild, area, land. However after studying Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work, I’m satisfied that the voids in her work communicate volumes.
Georgia O’Keeffe, “Winter Road I” (1963), oil on canvas (© Board of Trustees, Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington)
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Late Work (2025), written by Randall C. Griffin and printed by Yale College Press, is obtainable on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
