Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM

217 Johnson Street

Santa Fe, New Mexico

 

 

Other than those who love New Mexico cuisine–and I am decidedly not a fan–the first thing anyone asks when they hear you’ve been to Santa Fe is, “Did you go to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum?”

 

Of course, I did. My first piece of advice to anyone planning to be in Santa Fe is to get tickets well in advance. The museum has some 1,200 pieces of O’Keeffe’s work–paintings, drawings, sculptures–but tickets are timed and in high demand. You can easily be shut out if you don’t reserve early. The second suggestion is that you don’t need to rush through it. The museum is small and only displays a few dozen of her works at a given moment in time.

 

Georgia O’Keeffe might well be the most famous artist in American history, so excuse me if you’ve heard this background spiel before. O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was born in Wisconsin and studied art first in Chicago, then in New York City. She arrived in New York shortly after the 1913 Armory exhibition that was the first time most Americans saw modern art. O’Keeffe was already disposed to accept it and began to produce abstractions that caught the eye of one of modernism’s biggest proponents, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. He sponsored O’Keeffe’s first solo show and soon the two were lovers. They married in in 1924.

 

In New York O’Keeffe produced abstracted cityscapes that attracted great notice. She was also one of Stieglitz’s favored models. His nudes of her cast her as a shapely and sensuous figure, though one whose facial features were more those of a “handsome” woman than a beautiful one. Stieglitz was also a quisquous rogue whose infidelities contributed to O’Keeffe’s mental health issues that resulted in several asylum confinements. Beginning in 1929, she began spending time in New Mexico and moved to Abiquiu in 1946 when Stieglitz died. She lived there for most of the rest of her life, though she spent her declining years in Santa Fe, where she passed in 1986. Eleven years later, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in that city.

 

It was an immediate hit and there has been much discussion of expansion or a new facility, but for now the Johnson Street facility is a big draw. O’Keeffe is best known for her New York abstractions, largescale flower paintings, dried skull ensembles, and New Mexico landscapes. Many of her works represent or suggest female genitalia, which were embraced by feminists. She was certainly an iron-willed individual in her own right, though she was a bundle of contradictions. She was also a clothes horse, could be as cranky as her late husband, and treated her artist sister Ida abominably. There is, however, no doubting her artistic genius.

 

Her work can also be found in Santa Fe’s New Mexico Art Museum (NMAM). Below are some works I found intriguing at both her namesake facility and the NMAM. As you might suspect, most of it consists of works she created in the Southwest, not south of Broadway. Both museums also have photographs that feature O’Keeffe. Enjoy these images, but know that there is no substitute for seeing them up close and personal.

 

Rob Weir