Abstraction as a form for the incomprehensible
Many photos, mostly taken by her patron and later husband, the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, show a shy, attractive woman who now lives in the upper class on the east coast, but who dedicates her artistic work entirely to the perception of nature and landscape. In doing so, she finds something that goes beyond pure representation: abstraction is the most precise form for the incomprehensible, she says – and with her flower pictures she moves in a zone that reveals the botanical in an almost obscene way.
In her landscapes she tries to visualize sounds synaesthetically; the forms bud in the flowers, and whoever wants to can see ornamentally disguised female genitals in some of the pictures. Curator Theodora Vischer: “Of course, the women’s movement tried to claim Georgia O’Keeffe as a feminist painter; she herself always refused and declared in 1926 that one likes flowers, one looks at them, one might smell them, but you never take the time to look at them in peace.” Georgia O’Keeffe said she painted what each flower meant to her. And she painted them so big “so that others can see what I see”.
