'Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle' at the San Diego Museum of Art
ART REVIEW
The exhibit showcases women who were linked by one man and helped redefine American art.
SAN DIEGO -- Long before Hillary, there was Georgia -- another woman of formidable talents whose charismatic, powerful husband afforded her substantial opportunities, even as he influenced the shaping of her public identity. With Bill Clinton, at least, that influence seems an outgrowth of circumstances more than design. The same can't be said of Alfred Stieglitz, who, according to a new book and exhibition, molded the image of his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, to fit his notion of the ideal "woman-child."
Photographer, gallery owner and journal publisher, Stieglitz was, arguably, the early 20th century's most avid advocate for the recognition of Modern art in America. He introduced this country to Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne, and championed numerous American Modernists, including Dove, Hartley, Marin and Weber.
He staged exhibitions of several female artists, but O'Keeffe's role in his personal life and professional enterprises eclipsed them all. Her work likewise dominates the exhibition "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle," now making its final stop at the San Diego Museum of Art. With 27 paintings and drawings by O'Keeffe among more than 50 works by others, the show is a feast for fans of the artist as well as an abbreviated but still provocative art history lesson.
The exhibition grew out of the recent book "Modernism and the Feminine Voice" by Kathleen Pyne. For the show, Pyne collaborated with curators Barbara Buhler Lynes of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., and Sylvia Yount of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Both exhibition and text trace the idea that Stieglitz, much influenced by Freud, linked the creative process to femininity, and femininity to both mature sexuality and childlike intuition.
Stieglitz hardly expected the male artists he exhibited and published to represent the fundamental nature of manhood, but he looked for and emphasized expressions of a female sensibility in the women he supported. Anne Brigman engages the age-old symbiotic connection between woman and nature in her moody, balletic photographs, many of them nude self-portraits. In a 1905 print, a woman rises milky white from a dark cleft between rocks. In another image, from 1907, her body seems to spiral upward as if an extension of a twisted and split tree trunk.
