Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction

Whitney Museum of American Art

Through Jan. 17, 2010

“No other figure in American art history went from heights to has-been so quickly” as Georgia O’Keeffe, said Jerry Saltz in New York. The pathbreaking ­artist first pushed her painting into abstraction in 1915—“phenomenally early for an American.” But by her death in 1986, at 98, many thought of her as, primarily, a “painter of pretty pictures—or, I should say, pretty genitalia.” Resemblances to vulvas and breasts were read into the artist’s folding, flowering patterns by unimaginative critics with agendas of their own. “And those were the admirers!” Bravo to the Whitney Museum for refusing to treat O’Keeffe as merely a feminist icon. This “revelatory survey” of the artist’s early works proves that “O’Keeffe produced some of the most original and ambitious art in the 20th century.”

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To be fair to her critics, “O’Keeffe’s work invites” a sexual interpretation more often than not, said Richard Lacayo in Time. “When you’re faced with the labial purple coils of a painting like Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, from 1918, what else can you think about?” Yet most works here hardly come off as emblems of “the Eternal Feminine”—or even obviously the work of a female artist at all. The churning, “purely abstract” charcoals she created as a 28-year-old were “some of the most radical work being done anywhere at that moment.” Gradually, she developed the “eruptions of soft form” that would mark her later work, but still retained the “taut, sharp-edged” style evident in Red & Orange Streak (1919). “What’s so refreshing” about the Whitney’s exhibition is that it “spares us O’Keeffe the Earth Mother,” while simultaneously reminding us that she was an “endlessly inventive formalist” even as a young woman.