Customer Reviews

Becoming O'Keeffe: The Early Years

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Having viewed the recent Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit on "Colors and Conservation" in Rochester, NY (which Mississippi Museum of Art-originated exhibit has its own, fine catalogue), I found this volume most illuminative regarding O'Keeffe's relationships as they informed her development as an artist. As a example of the type of "close reading" undertaken by the author here, the background offered on O'Keeffe's "Lake George Farmhouse Door" (near the close of the book, though only halfway through O'Keeffe's life) suggests it may be taken as a response of sorts to her husband's earlier photograph of a smiling, younger woman posed in front of the same doorway.

The author thus raises questions on creative transformations involved in making art. Why, for example, is the door-glass opaque in the artist's painting instead of something we can see through in her husband's photograph? Does her rendering of their summer home's door suggest a way into or a blocking out from the artist's own life, as the photo itself is held to suggest of the woman depicted in it? One does not need this sort of background in order to appreciate the painting itself, held by MoMA, but those seeking autobiographical insights on O'Keeffe's early work should find "Becoming O'Keeffe" intriguing reading.

I am irritated by writers who purport to know the inner thoughts of people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. Peters has collected plenty of information on what was going on in the American and European art worlds, and it's worth reading for that. There are also some works here I haven't seen in other books. But if Peters wants to understand O'Keeffe's state of mind and approach to her work, why take O'Keeffe's perfectly clear and straightforward writings and then negate them in favor of hyperbolic, overwrought analysis? Having to repeatedly reject an artist's own words and play the game of "What she really meant was..." is a good sign that you don't understand the subject. Why are O'Keeffe's simple words so hard for her to comprehend? Peters' analogies stretch far past the point of usefulness: a closed window equals a camera lens? Paintings of trees become "prototypes" for paintings of crosses made 5 years later? Does she mean O'Keeffe was really trying to paint crosses, and they just came out looking like trees? Or that the first time O'Keeffe saw a cross she thought "Oh, that looks like a tree"? This book isn't nearly as much about O'Keeffe as it is about what Peters would have been doing if she could magically take O'Keeffe's place. Maybe Peters gets really confused about simple actions, like putting a drawing on the floor, because she's never done much artwork. Sometimes you have to put things on the floor because in the facilities you have available, that's the easiest way to see and work on them. I think the lesson here is that if you have to change something to your own words to understand it, you're no longer perceiving that thing--you're only perceiving yourself. Peters spends a lot of time here reflecting her own thought process, and in doing so, misses not only O'Keeffe, but maybe visual art itself.