At MIA: Georgia O’Keefe, the artist who loved circles

By Elaine Klaassen

I have never been drawn to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’ve of course been moved by the image of the lone woman in the desert, painting without wavering. And I have of course admired her giant stature among artists.

But I’ve never gotten that much out of her painting. It has never given me a strong feeling—like a desire to return to it. I’ve never thought it was breathtaking or fascinating or moving. Her work, mostly the well known flowers and bones, always seemed ascetic and lacking in sensuality. The currently installed show of her work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Circling Around Abstraction,” helps me to see why I don’t love her work. At the same time, I came away from the show with a deeper appreciation of what she was up to. And, as always, being in the presence of the real artifacts, as opposed to reproductions, the purely sensorial, as well as spiritual, emotional and narrative impact, is completely different. The difference is that of day and night.

I think O’Keeffe was more of a scientist than an artist—kind of like Madame Curie. It goes without saying that all great art has a scientific component and all serious scientific work contains an artistic process—art without science and science without art are limited pursuits—but in O’Keeffe’s work, it seems like the cerebral and the calculable outweigh instinctive, gut-level knowledge. Rigor outweighs intuition.

The focus of the curator, Jonathan Stuhlman, is to show the historical uniqueness of O’Keeffe’s circular forms in American abstract art. In her early work, the circular forms were abstracted representations of dense objects, and in later years often represented holes. Stuhlman also demonstrates another distinctive feature of her work: she maintained a balance between abstraction and representation. The exhibition shows us that she was working on ideas that were very new. In fact, she wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before.

To distill a realistic, recognizable thing into its essence, visually, was O’Keeffe’s task. As she progressed, she began to leave off the borders of the objects she painted. “Inside Clam Shell” becomes a terrain, since one doesn’t see the shell nor imagine its outer form until reading the title. The same thing occurs in “Abstraction White Rose.”

Especially interesting to me were the paintings in which a physical sensation was distilled into visual form—the feeling of listening to music, or the feeling of losing consciousness before surgery, for example.

Macular degeneration at the end of O’Keeffe’s very long life (she lived to be nearly 100) left her blind and finally unable to paint at all. One of her very last paintings, or maybe the actual last one, was my favorite in the show. It achieves the extreme of distillation, it nails the essence of her world. It doesn’t appear to be an idea of horizon and celestial body, it is more than that. I think it’s only two brush strokes, blue on white. A whole lifetime of distilling and essentializing, together with her notions of Notan, a Japanese art form that she studied, and her marriage to the land and sky all converged to become “Untitled (Abstraction Blue Circle and Line).” It’s like a beautiful epitath. It knocked me out.

Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Ave S. 612-870-3000
Free museum entry. O’Keefe exhibit, $8/$6 for students and seniors..
Hours: Tue. – Wed., Fri. – Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thu 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. & Sun. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.