Known for her plant compositions and flowers tinged with eroticism, this emancipated artist reveals other facets in the first retrospective dedicated to her in France. His work reconciling figuration and abstraction was deployed from 1916 to the 1960s.
In the slideshow opening the Georgia O’Keeffe (1887- 1986) retrospective at the Center Pompidou, she looks like Calamity Jane, cowboy hat, weathered face, long black figure roaming the arid lands of her ranch in New Mexico. “She is one of those haughty and conquering figures who forged American mythology” writes Didier Ottinger, curator of the first retrospective in France devoted to this pioneer of modern art. It was time !
Of this emancipated woman, we know the disturbing plant compositions, the close-ups of flowers with erotic connotations and bright colors. The exhibition unveils other aspects of his work with this consistency: “Realistic painting is never good if it is not successful from an abstract point of view” says the one who reconciles abstraction and figuration.
Carcasses
His first charcoals are imbued with this duality. They were exhibited from 1916 in the New York gallery of the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, his pygmalion and his companion until his death in 1946. Georgia O’Keeffe delivers dreamlike visions of an urban America where skyscrapers are erected. skies. She is also sensitive to the movements of the sky and the water on the shores of Lake George, the place of a bucolic family residence. Later in New Mexico, animal carcasses and bones give a surreal atmosphere to desert landscapes. Over time, the artist purifies his subjects, lightens his colors, claims a spirituality. In the 1960s, trees and rivers became calligraphic ribbons. Minimalism is in tune with the times, but O’Keeffe is still inspired by nature.
(Center Pompidou until December 6).
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