O'Keefe as I see her

To begin with, she was always old. I thought I had discovered her for myself when I scissored a photograph of her from a magazine and pinned it up in my college bedroom in 1960 or thereabouts.

She was old, she was famous, I was 17 maybe 18 and bored with Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Helen Keller and other worthy role models. Four years later, after graduation, when I had to dismantle my college room with its wall of hundreds of massed images, what impulse, what motive, made me save only this one? I really can't remember now, but was it because the artist still intrigued me? Or was it because I liked this particular photograph so much? Or was it because I, too, wanted to live in New Mexico and wear Navaho jewellery? Or was it because I admired the luminous abstract painting from the Pelvis Series?

How can I remember what exactly made me put this cut-out photograph away so carefully, like a flower commemorating a special day, pressed between two of the 600 large pages of the book I still think is the very best history of American art, Oliver Larkin's Art and Life in America? Preserved like a secret in the midst of this vast expanse, the photograph came with me to England inside the book, completely unremembered. I didn't look at either of them again for years.

By 1985, when I was asked to discuss my personal 'heroines' for a book of the same title, I had been looking for a long time into the life and work of Georgia O'Keeffe. Curiously perhaps, like so many others, I had always been looking at her in isolation, not as part of any history of art. I proposed her as one of my heroines.

My existence as an artist requires absolute honesty about my sources of inspiration. No degree of potential historical or social embarrassment could prevent my saying that undoubtedly, I would not have been able to be an artist of the kind I am, without having leaned on her... Or, rather, on my image of her.

And I don't even like her work that much, aside from the early vivid watercolours ­ which I Þnd very exciting ­ and certain of the more abstract pieces from other periods of her life. I am in general agreement with Marya Mannes, who wrote in 1928 that, despite the work's 'frequent and unprecedented beauty' it is somehow bodiless.1

But I was an ignorant child, and she was the only artist who was female, whom I'd ever heard positively praised. Without her, I might have gone for longer imagining that art was an exclusively male game, like American football. Artemisia Gentilleschi, Rosa Bonheur, Judith Leyster, had been forgotten. Artists I heard about, like Mary Cassat, Marie Laurencin, Berthe Morisot, Meret Oppenheim, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Delauney, Alice Neel were belittled or denigrated. People said they were all second-rate...

I didn't have the good luck to mistakenly believe when I was young that Cézanne was a woman, as one artist friend of mine did. She grew up thinking that, like Marianne or Joanne, Cézanne was clearly female, as well as the greatest modern artist in the world. By the time my friend discovered her mistake, she had internalised the notion that she, too, might someday be the greatest modern artist in the world, since it would be only natural for one woman to follow another in that position.

But speaking personally, it took effort and it took time to Þgure out why I was having certain doubts, certain depressions, certain complications. In the 70s I struggled to deÞne in words the implications of my ambiguous placement in language and culture as a woman and an artist. Thinking about these things was discouraging ­ thinking about these things was encouraging ­ there were debates, polemics, theories. I made work, I thought about work, I thought about making work.

Still, I hadn't looked at Art and Life in America for years and years. The book remained unopened until recently, when I loaned it to an English art critic who had been, I felt, expressing rather too freely his views on American art without knowing anything at all about its history. As I handed the book to him, the photograph fell out. I realised I had been looking at O'Keeffe as though peering into a mirror to get a glimpse of myself, trying to see some of the contradictory aspects of her importance for me, and for so many other artists.

If I can't see myself except through looking at the 'other', what does looking at O'Keeffe show me? For one thing, it shows me that the frame of this mirror is too constricting, the reþection of O'Keeffe takes up the whole surface, it's too binary, just me and her, with no space for background or context.

When I pinned the photograph on my wall, I must have already seen many reproductions of Steiglitz's photos representing the hands, the face, the naked torso of Georgia O'Keeffe. (In fact, some of these images were so familiar that my college friends and I sometimes referred sarcastically to our own inky or paint-stained hands as 'the hands of Georgia O'Keeffe', which struck us as hilariously funny.)

This photograph is not by Steiglitz. It is an image of an old woman looking at a medium-sized abstract painting. It is her painting, she painted it. And she is showing it to the photographer and to us, rather artiÞcially it's clear, on a large studio easel transported out to the desert probably just to display this painting, which, being abstract, does not seem to me to beneÞt from being literally placed back in the landscape. In fact, this now makes me very uneasy. I know how posed this image must be, I have posed for some similar ones myself. Still, it is a fairly conventional portrayal of the artist with one of her works. I must have been very glad, so many years ago, to come across, among all the remarkable images of her that exist, this one relatively straightforward picture of O'Keeffe standing by her work in an ordinary way.

Did no one ever photograph O'Keeffe actually working, painting? Did she refuse this? Was it too private? Or did she simply co-operate with various photographers, none of whom, for whatever reason, wanted to picture her at work? If so, her function in other people's work ­ that is, in their photographs ­ is that of an artist's model, providing a vehicle for the vision, fantasies, or projections of others. In which case, hardly any photograph of her can tell us much about her. They are all constructions, quite clearly. These images of O'Keeffe do not display her subjectivity, but rather the constitutive forces of desire in the men who photographed her. And though they may well be art, and useful, too, in showing a range of fantasies and projections our culture allows as legitimate in respect to the female body, I care for them much less than I care for O'Keeffe's paintings.

Steiglitz showed her hands sewing, but never painting. Her hands caress a skull or a bit of gnarled wood, they are oddly folded or peculiarly posed in relation to her breasts, her neck, etc. In his photograph of her hands with a large pelvis-like watercolour, Steiglitz poses the hands at the perimeter of the pelvis shape as though fondling it languidly. By implication, these hands and this suggestive void are parts of one body. There is no separation between the artist and the work, her painting replaces a speciÞc area of her body, and her hands end at the wrist. We are witnesses to the representation of the artist's work as an intimate part of her own anatomy.

In several related photographs, O'Keeffe is shown gesturing provocatively, oddly echoing the arrangement of certain forms in her abstract paintings, which are displayed only as backgrounds, not as autonomous works. In another image, which features the juxtaposition of two artworks without any human presence, Steiglitz placed a small phallus-shaped sculpture in front of the large void at the centre of Music Pink and Blue (1919), documenting his own fantasy of a sexual relationship between the abstract forms of the two works.

In looking at these photographs, we are truly participating in a private view ­ not just witnessing the traditional relationship of a photographer to a beloved model ­ but being invited to share in the revelation that the artworks produced by her are available for the same kind of erotic delectation and scrutiny as her body. This is complicated.

Insofar as this is a woman's body, the female onlooker, willingly or not, entirely or partially, is identiÞed with the body under observation. It happens to be that of Georgia O'Keeffe, artist. Her art is shown as part of her body. In his portraits of her with her work, Steiglitz illustrates his belief that what he had found in her work, to quote his famous words, was 'Finally, a woman on paper.' Is there some way of looking at her work, or some kind of interpretation by means of which we could exempt ourselves from seeing as if in collusion with the great artist, her husband, photographing her? Here the dimension of desire appears, since we are not 'really' in the image we see: I desire to see O'Keeffe's work as separate from her body, as an act of conscious creation, as art. I do not wish to consume these photographs as the photographer intended me to; I do desire to see his intention as an artefact of his own desire, as his representation, not as a reading of her work, her desire. Or of mine.

How might I function so as not to be Þxed in my pose as the embodiment of the desire of another? This is urgent, for the future. Reading the body as the sole sign of identity is how patriarchy regulates the bodies of women. Herself as her body. Her body as a site of natural reproduction, not cultural production. Her femaleness reduced to her sexuality. To have to endure, as O'Keeffe did, having this said of one's life's work ­ that it 'registered the manner of perception anchored in the constitution of the woman. The organs that differentiate the sex speak. Women...always feel, when they feel strongly, through the womb.'2 No wonder she hated being called a 'woman artist'; she couldn't speak as a woman, since her sexual organs did.

The artist's terrible struggle to locate, deÞne, and represent her own subjectivity is conveyed by O'Keeffe in her work. But subjectivity, a sense of identity, doesn't reside in the body you can see ­ your own or another's. Re-presenting the body as a sign, identifying self with a sexuality deÞned by and for the other, re-inscribing woman as þower, is like rattling the chains of your prison. Without showing a way out, it signals the desire to escape. In O'Keeffe's work, the signal is loud and clear, sustained and courageous. There is no reason, having heard it, not to understand it as a message or statement lucidly analysing a situation, a predicament.

One of O'Keeffe's strategies in painting was to undermine or destabilise the notion of the female 'body' by eliminating its traces in her work. Her paintings are always images, never objects. In this they seem to be talking back to photography. This is implied in her adroit references to photographic artefacts, in The Shelton with Sunspots (1923), for example, or in the extreme closeups of þowers for which she is famous. Her refusal to evoke 'body' has especially interesting implications in those works, like the þowers, which are said to represent body, female body. In my experience, while it is possible in art to evoke 'body', this is not what is communicated through representation. Intimacy is a blur, a smear, a stain, not a clinical sharpness. There is nothing in her work's content to justify its reception by viewers as 'living and shameless private documents'.3

I read content in the rhythms, contrasts, þows and gaps of the material practice of painting, not in its subject matter. (To confuse subject matter with content is literary.) Aside from early watercolours, her technique is coolly detached. No texture. Everything is surface, as in a mirror or through a lens. One might well say that it 'implied a kind of visual efÞciency that could be taken as a symbol of intellectual honesty.'4 That was how she dealt with the issue of subjectivity for most of her life.

As Gertrude Stein insisted, 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' It is not part of a woman's body, nor is a woman a þower. In an important way, much of O'Keeffe's work is as ungendered as the work of most American artists of her generation. To do justice to O'Keeffe in an historical context we need to look very hard at the other artists who emerged in the United States during the same period. She was in touch with many of them, and this set of connections ought to be visible to us. O'Keeffe's New York paintings need to be seen alongside, say, Charles Sheeler's Church Street El. Her early and late abstractions are related to those of her close friend Arthur Dove, for instance his Snow Thaw. Her approach to landscape ought to be viewed in relation to the work of those of her contemporaries with whom she had personal connections, like John Marin or the now-forgotten Louis Eilshemius, and the better-known Charles Demuth. Otherwise, she will continue to be seen as an isolated Þgure, an aberration, a sport, a freak of nature.

Linda Nochlin's conclusion to her historical survey of women artists points out that, 'In every instance, women artists would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own period than they are to each other.' This is an anti-essentialist refusal to see all women as woman, man's 'other'. The artist who is a woman is a speaking subject whose work represents her time as much as her place, her world view as well as herself, her mind as well as her body. O'Keeffe's work, more than most, exempliÞes this dialectical sequence of terms. And in addition, it implies something more, something for the future. In 1925, in a letter to Mabel Dodge, she wrote: 'What the men can't ­ what I want written ­ I do not know ­ I have no deÞnite idea of what it should be ­ but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colours as an expression of living ­ might say something that a man can't ­ I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore ­ the men have done all they can do about it.'5

There is one very early Steiglitz photograph of her in a long dress holding a saw in her hand, beside a man on a ladder trimming trees ­ but I have never seen an image of her holding in her hand a paintbrush or a pencil. There are pictures of her looking at rocks, bones, sticks; standing at social gatherings; and sitting in the desert. There are no photographs of her at work in the studio. In fact, it now occurs to me, my image of O'Keeffe is based on a photograph cut from a magazine long ago, that may well be the only one showing the artist as an unfetishised, full-bodied individual, alongside her work... Was it his idea? Or did she, for once, suggest the idea for her pose to the photographer?