On “The Brady Bunch,” it was “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.” This month in the art world, it’s “Georgia Georgia, Georgia.” Georgia O’keeffe can be found around every corner from exhibits across the country to auctions.
While attention to O’Keeffe has been given for going on 100 years, surprises are still being discovered, including a mostly unknown sibling possessing major talent of her own.
Ida O’keeffe never upstaged Georgia during their lifetimes, and isn’t now, but what she is getting is her first ever solo museum exhibit, Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow, opening November 18 and running through February 24, 2019 at the Dallas Museum of Art.
“The sisters enjoyed a very close relationship up into the early 1930’s,” Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, said. “One often finds references embedded in Georgia’s correspondence with friends, or in (influential New York photographer, gallerist, and future husband of Georgia, Alfred) Stieglitz’s correspondence to his friends in which he quotes Georgia, that Ida was, ‘the nicest girl I’ve ever known,’ or, the ‘nicest girl I’ve ever met.' The times they spent together at Lake George (New York) are documented in Stieglitz’s photographs of them, particularly 1924, and clearly reveal how much fun they had together and how much they took comfort in one another’s company.
“It’s in the 1930's when Ida, as well as another younger sister, Catherine, is exhibiting at galleries in New York, and the galleries, as well as the critics, are speaking of them–Ida, Catherine, and Georgia–as a ‘family of artists.’ Georgia was not interested in being part of a trio and was determined that she was known as the only O’Keeffe who painted. According to an interview with Catherine, Georgia demanded that they both stop exhibiting. Catherine stopped exhibiting altogether. Ida did not.”
Apparently Georgia O’Keeffe’s work wasn’t the only aspect of her which had edge.
The Cleveland Museum of Art pays attention to those other aspects, putting a more complete picture of the artist on display in its exhibit, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, on view from November 23 through March 3, 2019.
“Unlike previous exhibitions, Living Modern takes a much more holistic approach to O’Keeffe, demonstrating the fact that she was modern not just in her art, but in her life, as well,” Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said. “It accomplishes this by making fascinating connections between her art, lifestyle, clothing and home décor, and through the way she presented herself in portraits taken by a wide range of photographers. Ultimately, visitors have an unprecedented opportunity to get to know the person behind the art.”
Another surprise can be found in Virginia. The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia presents Unexpected O'Keeffe: The Virginia Watercolors and Later Paintings on view through January 27, 2019.
This exhibition explores O’Keeffe’s watercolor studies, sketches, paintings and other works produced during her time at the University of Virginia in the summers from 1912 to 1916. This is the first time the watercolors have been on view outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“Among the first college trained artists of her generation, O’Keeffe spent five total summers at UVA starting as a student (1912) and then returning as an instructor (1913-1916),” Elizabeth Hutton Turner, professor of modern art at the University of Virginia, said when announcing the exhibit. “It was a time of personal awakening that set her on a new path of abstraction and practice of drawing leading to her own radical pictorial invention.
“Here she was first introduced to exercises equating line and vision in Arthur Wesley Dow’s ‘Book of Composition.’ O’Keeffe’s method of dividing and filling compositional space, begun in Charlottesville, forms the basis for the mature works that many already know and admire. What people will be surprised to learn is how it all began in Charlottesville.”
O’Keeffe isn’t the only groundbreaking woman having her story finally told more completely in Virginia.
In Williamsburg, at the Jamestown Settlement, TENACITY: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia, will share little-known, captivating personal stories of real women in Jamestown and the early Virginia colony and their impact on a fledgling society.
This story-driven special exhibition will feature artifacts, images, and primary sources–some on display in America for the first time–to examine the struggles women faced in the New World and their contributions. The exhibit, which runs through January 5, 2020, includes stories of English, Native American, and African women who lived in Virginia during the 1600’s.
If you desire for more than simply looking at Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, and have an extra million–or several–dollars to spend on wall art, Sotheby’s can help. Sotheby’s has three O’Keeffe paintings on the auction block, two in its Contemporary Art Evening Auction on November 14 and one in its American Art Auction November 16. All three pieces come from the O’Keeffe Museum with their sale benefiting the museum’s acquisitions fund; they are on public display leading up to the auctions at Sotheby’s New York galleries.
This will be the first time Sotheby's offers O'Keeffe inside an auction of contemporary art.
Sotheby’s is no stranger to O’Keeffe having sold her Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1–also from the O’Keeffe Museum and benefiting its acquisitions fund–in 2014 for $44.4 million, still a record sale figure for any work by a female artist.
“Georgia O’Keeffe remains one of the most singular artistic voices of the last century–nothing looks like an O’Keeffe–and the diversity of this particular group of paintings touches upon the breadth and depth of her iconic career,” Grégoire Billault, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department in New York, said. “Her images are not only an essential part of American culture, but are now appreciated on an international stage among the great works of her time.”
A Street (1926) holds the top presale estimate of the three O’Keeffe’s going under the hammer at $12-18 million. A Street is one of about 20 works from her New York cityscapes series created between 1925 and 1929 which have become iconic not only in O’Keeffe’s body of work, but among cityscapes across art history.
Stieglitz warned O’Keeffe about her pursuit of this subject matter more traditionally associated with male artists and in dramatic departure from her supple flower paintings. Here was O’Keeffe, in the 1920’s, not only daring to be an artist, daring to be an artist and brazenly challenging her male counterparts on subject matter.
“She had little patience for many traditional roles and expectations assigned to women during her era,” Cole said. “The fact that she became a professional artist at a time when this was not an encouraged career option for women is a fundamental case in point. Her desire for independence and equality infused many aspects of her life, and her philosophy of living remains both appealing and inspiring.”
Georgia O’Keeffe is the most well-known female artist in history. No other stands a close second. Talent plays a huge role in that, but O’Keeffe’s sister, Ida, had talent too.
How was Georgia able to break out while Ida could not?
“Many reasons. While (Ida) sold some works, my sense is that she hung on to many works that she considered her strongest works,” Canterbury said. “I say this as during the Great Depression of the 1930’s when she launched her career as an artist–bit of unfortunate timing there–she often marked works ‘NFS’ (not for sale), or set the price so high that it would have been out of reach for many/most people.
“Ida also lacked—as did almost every other woman artist in the first half of the twentieth century—the representation of a good dealer who could have promoted her work through exhibitions and good clients.
“Also to be considered is how Ida’s series of teaching positions removed her from the sphere of influence of New York City. She tried to keep her foot in the door as much as possible, but following her move to Whittier, California in the early 1940’s, she never exhibited works in New York again.”
