New York flower, desert flower

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is a painter extremely well known in the United States and still very little in Europe. Her work confronts us with a particular situation: she was a painter, sculptor, but also the model and the most photographed woman in America by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. In the last forty years of her life ( Stieglitz died in 1946), she traveled a lot, but little in Europe. It will mainly be Asia, India, Pakistan, Japan.

But above all, she is an American woman born in deep Wisconsin and her paintings show it for themselves. Whether she combs flowers with naturalistic precision or the sparkle of lights on the windows of buildings, she has the same powerful and passionate vision. This sense of excess, of space, of depth – certain shots of bones in the desert or these gigantic flowers – is that of an artist who has a passion for the earth and nature.

In 1946, she made her home in New Mexico where she truly found the land of her dreams. There, she comes into communion with the colors, the shapes of the hills, but also those of the bones of these pelvis through which she finds the idea of ​​looking at the sky. In the last years of his life, his paintings gain in intensity and freedom. One of the rare intellectuals to have written about her in France is Julia Kristeva: “Like a savage force emerging from powerful nature, from the new continent, in intimate communion with its colors, winds, sounds, flowers, flesh, bones, mountains, canyons , plains, O’Keeffe seems to touch on the adventure of modern art. ” Indeed, she crossed powerful artistic currents of her time by keeping the same course, the same stubborn vision. “I have no merit, she declared, I could not help but see with my own eyes”.

Sound portrait of this painter with an opening of an unpublished archive of her voice.