Centre Pompidou
From September 8 to December 6, 2021
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He is an icon in the United States, better known than Hopper across the Atlantic. Georgia O’Keeffe is what is called a legend, a mythology. Georgia O’Keeffe is none other than the most expensive female artist in the world with a record $ 44 million for a work, the first woman to have been exhibited at MoMA in New York, the one who preceded by her success the iconic Jackson Pollock before World War II. So how is it that it took 35 years after his death to finally dedicate a major retrospective to him in Paris? The Center Pompidou brings together here a hundred of his works, from all over the world, because the Parisian museum has only one of his works. A huge project therefore to bring these paintings here, and offer the public a new reading – or re-reading – of the artist’s work. The History of Art has retained from Georgia O’Keeffe her giant flowers, her carnal petals, her exuberant pistils. And for good reason, what flamboyance! However, these works are far from having united the critics… When these canvases appear in 1923, the Freudian revolution is in progress. It is the scandal. His exhibition panicked the art world, which saw in it the provocative expression of feminine desire, like so many erotic images and barely concealed sexual symbols… A hypothesis radically refuted by the artist, who accused his detractors of projecting onto his canvases their own obsessions… Here is what gives the tone of the personality of an immense artist with a strong character. Beyond its sprawling flowers, we plunge here into an extraordinary universe, which sweeps over more than 60 years of creation, discovering over the course of its works the birth of American modernism. Its New York skyscrapers would make us dizzy, its floral swirls hypnotize us as much as they intrigue us, its New Mexico lunar landscapes invite us to contemplation. A single constant in his work: a vital energy nourished by light, color and sensuality. Georgia O’Keeffe leaves us a vivid and intense legacy, an unclassifiable painting that caresses the contours of abstraction without ever completely succumbing to it. An artist who all her life, over almost 100 years, will continue to follow the only codes she will enact, enlightening the History of art with her audacious visions.
We visited the exhibition in preview, and here are some pictures:
Who does not know the flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe, these organic curves of ineffable beauty and certain ambiguity? Her subjective canvases undoubtedly contributed to the international renown of the woman who is nicknamed the “mother of American modernism” and certainly signed one of the most burning chapters in the history of art. Rich in a hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, the exhibition – the first French retrospective entirely dedicated to the artist – thus embraces his entire artistic career, from his first cosmic vertigo to his New York skyscrapers in the 20s, to New Mexico, her adopted land, where she settled permanently after the Second World War. A figure apart from American abstraction, Georgia O’Keeffe developed throughout her life a solitary work, oriented towards an acute observation of nature and its wide open spaces. A reader of Kandinsky, the artist who was the first woman to integrate the MoMA exhibitions caressed the contours of abstraction without ever completely succumbing to it. Endowed with an independent character, she will remain on the sidelines of all movements, preferring to develop a universe of her own, at the same time sensual, contemplative and biomorphic.
Did you know ?
Wife of gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz – who revealed her in 1917 by devoting an exhibition to her every year in his space – Georgia O’Keeffe is, according to legend, the most photographed woman of the 20th century. In 18 years, her husband made some 350 portraits and more than 300 nude photos of his wife.
Focus on… the intimate flora of the artist
35 years after her death, Georgia O’Keeffe still sees herself decked out with the oh-so-simplistic label of “vagina painter”. Everything changed in 1919, the year that marked the beginning of a fruitful period of exploration on the theme of flowers. His works, narrow visions of open corollas, unfolding petals and the triumphant pink pistil, perceived by the prism of Freudian theories as powerful sexual symbols, were then highly criticized. The artist herself rejected these interpretations: “When people see erotic symbols in my works, in reality, it is their problem”. Real misunderstanding?
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