Samantha Friedman (MoMA): A rare glimpse of Georgia O'Keeffe

Hi Samantha. Thank you for joining me today to discuss Georgia O'Keeffe and her exhibition To See Takes Time at MoMA. My first question is this. George O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin to Irish-Hungarian parents and brought up on a farm. How much did this shape her interest in art, and did the landscape and environment in Wisconsin influence her choosing nature as the main subject matter of her work?

I think it's a great way to start in her early days. And I guess I would say I don't know that the landscape of Wisconsin per se shaped her interest in the landscape as a subject for her work specifically. But I will say that that upbringing was crucial in other ways to the artist that she became. Being from a big farm family of seven kids, being extremely self-sufficient, being comfortable in nature, I think were all qualities that very much shaped the person and artist that O'Keeffe would become. Her kind of comfort with the outdoors, her desire for adventure. You know, her family moved to Virginia when she was in her mid-teens so her landscape would shift. But I think from the very beginning, there was a kind of comfort within different landscapes and you know, that she would move across the country in those early years as she was growing as a young artist and a teacher. So I think that was really important for making her the artist she was.

Why did MoMA choose to organise an exhibition focusing solely on O'Keeffe's works on paper?

I had organised a smaller exhibition a few years ago of post-war drawings from MoMA's collection called Degree Zero Drawing at Mid-Century and among the 80 some works from our collection I included in that show of drawings that were made between 1948 and 1961 was our latest O'Keeffe drawing, which is a 1959 charcoal that's in this exhibition. And when I hung it in that show, I hung it with an Ellsworth Kelly. It looked very at home and happy. And when I would take people through, they were very shocked to learn that this was an O'Keeffe drawing because it didn't conform to people's expectations of the artist. And I found that to be really exciting, that an artist who is so well known could still surprise people with her work that she made work not at the moment we consider to be her heyday of the 20s, and that it looked quite different from the blown-up flower paintings that are maybe the works that people most quickly and easily conjure in their heads when they're thinking of the artist. So, when I researched that drawing, I realised it was part of a series and that in fact most of the works on paper O'Keeffe made were themselves parts of a series, and there hadn't really been an exhibition that looked at bringing her series on paper together. I've been at MoMA for a long time. I'm well acquainted with some of our wonderful works on paper, the Evening Star watercolour, for example, the Train watercolour. I'd seen those works exhibited over the years, but I hadn't known that there were eight Evening Stars, and that there were three Trains. And I figured if I didn't know that, a lot of people probably didn't know that. And then the kind of last piece of the puzzle was realising that it had been 77 years since MoMA had given Georgia O'Keeffe a monographic exhibition. The last one was in 1946. I found that quite shocking, really surprising. It was a fact I had to check numerous times to make sure I had it right. So it seemed it was high time to honour her in that way. And that path that the previous project had led me down through that drawing seemed like an ideal way to do it, to show her in a different light, to shift the focus, to see a side of the artist that was maybe a bit fresh and showed her in a way that was quite different from how many of us encounter her.

What is it about O'Keeffe's painting techniques and subject matter that established her reputation as an innovative modernist?

I would say that in these key early years of her developing her visual language – and we're talking about really 1915 to 1917 – we have an artist who is working both within the realm of radical abstraction that many artists in those early decades of the 20th century are embracing. But she's doing it in quite a personal way also. So she trains to be an artist, she trains with different teachers. She's absorbing all of these theories of the day. And at a certain point, she says, 'I have shapes in my head that are not like what anyone taught me.' And so she steps back to listen to those shapes. So she's working in a kind of radically abstract visual language that is resonant with a lot of the innovations that are going on in those decades of the early 20th century. But she's doing it in a way that feels very deeply personal to her. And I think it's that combination, you know, that really makes her language innovative and modern at that at that moment.

Which artists influenced O’Keeffe throughout her career?

She talks about, in these key years which we're discussing, reading Kandisnky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, I think Kandinsky was a touchstone for a lot of artists at this moment, talking about these almost synaesthesia qualities of the different arts, the way that visual art might aspire to the condition of music, the idea of different forms of being associated with different sounds, being associated with different colours. And this is really moving for O'Keeffe, really influential. Within the kind of American vein of artists that Alfred Stieglitz is kind of building up, it's Arthur Dove who is the most resonant for O'Keeffe and indeed who are most resonant for each other. O'Keeffe is equally influential to Dove. I think this ability to kind of live in the grey area between nature and abstraction is something that's really important for both of them. And she sees the work by Dove reproduced in an important book, and that kind of sends her on a path of really admiring him. And they would become, you know, close peers and co-admirers. I think it's interesting to note that it's not only draughtsmen and painters who were exciting for O'Keeffe. You know, of course, Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist who would become her husband, is introducing her to many circles of photography in this moment. And his younger acolyte, Paul Strand, is someone whose work is really influential to O'Keeffe. She talks about a moment when he showed her lots and lots of his prints and she says, 'I almost lost my mind over them, photographs that are as queer in shapes as Picasso drawings.' She's actually referring to a very particular Picasso drawing. I don't think she was a very general overall admirer of him necessarily, but there was one particular Cubist Picasso drawing that Stieglitz was showing in his gallery that she really took a liking to. So I think, you know, it really runs the gamut. And then, of course, this wasn't really what you were asking, but of course, it goes both ways. She continues to also be really influential for many artists of the next generation. You know, we have letters between her and Yayoi Kusama, between Agnes Martin, this younger generation of artists who are equally influenced by her. So those conversations are very active in both directions.

How significant is the relationship between O'Keeffe and MoMA, given that she was the first female artist to receive a proper retrospective at the museum?

Interestingly, I think it's been a complicated relationship over time, right? I mean, it would have to be the first woman artist to receive a retrospective in 1946 and then to go 77 years without another monograph. I thought a lot about whether that's O'Keeffe specific, whether that has to do again with the fact that her popularity or her presence as a kind of an icon might have overshadowed a sense of her seriousness at a certain point. But I think also it has to do with MoMA's complex history with American art pre-1945. Right? We all know that in MoMA's earlier decades, so many curators invited American art, whether it was the Stieglitz circle of modernism, whether it was self-taught or folk art over the years as that kind of canon became more entrenched of this linear story of modernism with which the museum had become associated, the idea of American art pre-1945, this realism or these kinds of realisms that preceded abstraction and abstract expressionism, were a little bit sidelined, right? They didn't fit into this story. And so I think that those priorities complicated MoMA's relationship to the artist and to her work. I think that it's really exciting and great news that in the last decade or so, we've really complicated the stories that we're telling such that an artist needn't fit into some of those linear trajectories, and I think that's part of what opens up a place for her in a really exciting way. That being said, I think it really is interesting to look back and even if she hadn't received a monograph in all those years, to look back at some of the group exhibitions in which she was included, there's one in particular that I found to be really interesting an exhibition from 1968 called The Art of the Real that a curator named E.C. Goosen organised. And if you read his catalogue essay for that show, which is available on MoMA's website in the form, he holds her up as a kind of a precursor to Ellsworth Kelly to Jasper Johns in this way that feels at first really strange to the stories we've crafted about modernism but are really exciting. And so it's really interesting to look back at the moments in which she was, you know, held up for her innovations, even if she hadn't received a monograph in all those years.

What is it about the charcoal drawings O’Keeffe made between 1911 and 1918 that propelled her career in a new direction and brought her work to the attention of the American public?

These charcoal drawings are just amazing. I mean, the exhibition begins with a number of them, many of which she called specials a kind of loving nickname she would give to these early works when she found them to be particularly successful. They are so bold, they're so abstract. And they also contain the kind of blueprints for her visual language, for her whole career, these kinds of spiral forms, this repertory of marks, the way that she negotiates value, the way that she wipes away areas of mid-tone to achieve bright highlights. Like they're just, um, I mean, in addition to being really innovative, they're absolutely lush and gorgeous. Some of them feel very mysterious. Some of them feel very strange. Critics, even in those years struggled to describe them. Um, you know, they, they talked about a scarecrow or, you know, grasping at different ways to to describe them. There's one special from 1915 that she herself described as the drawing of a headache. So the idea that you might describe a physical sensation in visual terms. So just really radical investigation and exploration. And she was sending a lot of these works. She was rolling them up and sending them in the mail in a tube, which of course, not a method we would use to travel them today to her good friend Anita Pulitzer in New York and really wanting validation, wanting to show these works. Anita shows them to Stieglitz and he includes three of them in an exhibition in 1916 and then gives her a solo show in 1917 and that is what brings her work to the attention of the public. It really is through these charcoal drawings that the public sees O’Keeffe and finds her so captivating.

Have you personally learned anything new about O’Keeffe during your time curating the exhibition?

I have to say, I don’t even know where to begin with that question because pretty much everything I’ve learned during the making of this show, which I collaborated on with some wonderful colleagues.... If you had asked me five years if O’Keeffe was an artist I even cared about, I would have said no. The idea of her being a very popular artist turned me off. So, the kind of process about learning about her work and her work on paper that I experienced, I hope people who see the show will also experience that same learning curve. I wasn’t coming as an expert, I was coming as a convert and so really, everything was new for me. The most gratifying response to the show that I’ve heard has been ‘I had no idea that O’Keeffe made this work’ because that was my response too. So, it’s really all been new.