I am starting all over anew ‐ have put everything I have ever done away and don’t expect to get any of it out ever again.
The 28 year‐old Georgia O’Keeffe wrote these words to her friend Anita Pollitzer towards the end of 1915, while teaching in South Carolina and working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings evocative of natural forms, which she came to see as representing her “aesthetic awakening”. Against O’Keeffe’s wishes, Pollitzer took ten of the drawings to Alfred Stieglitz, who was then running his “291” art gallery in New York. Stieglitz called them the “purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while”, and in May 1916 what was to become a very long and legendary career was launched.
The drawing that most impressed Stieglitz (known as Drawing XIII) is reproduced on page 22 of Lisa Mintz Messinger’s concise and scholarly new survey of O’Keeffe’s life and work. Ms Messinger is currently Assistant Curator of Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; among her list of publications is a previous Thames and Hudson book on O’Keeffe (Messinger, 1988). In writing this book she has been aided by the recent appearance of a two‐volume catalogue raisonné of O’Keeffe’s work (Lynes, 1999). She incorporates a good number of quotations from the artist’s idiosyncratically written letters, an important selection of which was published in 1987 (Cowart et al., 1987). Her text is supported by lists providing details of illustrations and sources of quotations, and a 44‐item select bibliography.
The new front covers of the World of Art series have a more minimal, “cooler” look (being either predominantly black or white), but there is a riot of colour inside this book. The frontispiece is one of Stieglitz’s great portrait photographs of O’Keeffe aged 33; facing the last page of text is a dramatically still photograph of the 80‐year old O’Keeffe in a meditative pose in her bedroom at Abiquiu, New Mexico (by John Loengard). The midwife of O’Keeffe’s artistic breakthrough seems to have been an inspired teacher called Arthur Wesley Dow (1857‐1922), who wrote that “the artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies”. Messinger quotes her fellow O’Keeffe specialist Elizabeth Hutton Turner on what was happening in December 1915:
(S)he was on her hands and knees filling papers on the floor with swaths of charcoal. Her marks indicate movements made with the whole arm, from the shoulder, holding the stick upright,touching down with keen control and concentration, as Dow recommended, “without resting the hand”… Gone are the rhyme and meter of foreground, middle ground, and background to organize the illusory space behind the picture plane. What remains is a sense of things unfurling in motion and motion coiled in things (Turner, 1999).
