Is a flower ever just a flower? Or can one see, in its folds and contours, the erotic reframing of a woman’s body? Monumentalizing something as ephemeral, and as easy to overlook as a flower, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe redefined abstract art and American modernism. Yet, in the decades since, the “feminine” and “sexual” content attributed to her work have morphed into cliche, simplifying her work and obscuring what was unique in her modes of abstraction, composition, and method. How can we think, both with and beyond her flower paintings, about O’Keeffe’s conception and presentation of materiality? How, across her oeuvre, did O’Keeffe challenge masculine forms of art creation? How does her work fit within the larger sweep of modern art history, both in the United States and globally? And how can we understand O’Keeffe’s project as a whole, and its relation to representation—summarized in her remark: “I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at, not copy it”?
In this course, we will examine Georgia O’Keeffe’s art through the various lenses of aesthetics, feminist theory, and critical race theory. We’ll explore the political, racial, and aesthetic questions that arise, in both her early but especially her later work, which often focused on the “voided” landscapes of the colonized Southwest. We’ll examine, too, O’Keeffe’s place within the art movements and markets of her time, tracing the power structure of the art world and the relative autonomy of the artist vis-a-vis galleries, museums, critics, and curators. We will explore O’Keeffe’s legacy as both an icon and a brand, asking if and how the critical content of her work—and the challenge it presented to contemporary norms of art, femininity, and nature—have been co-opted and commoditized. In addition to examining O’Keeffe’s visual art, we will read from her published and private writing, including her letters, as well as secondary and academic writing by Alfred Stieglitz, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Griselda Pollock, Clement Greenberg (who largely excluded O’Keeffe from his discussion of American modernism), Charles Eldredge, and Anna Chave, among others.
