120816 – Sensuality – Tate Modern, London SE1

I went to the Tate Modern to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition with a pre-conceived idea of her work that of harmless and pleasing a kind of painterly lift music, distinctly background, the bedroom wall poster. The paintings are flat and have a pasty opacity, shadows are blended, ironed out to avoid all sharp edges, the surface wallows like ripples on a still pond. Distance is suppressed, with foreground and background given equal focus and intensity, the canvas filled equally from corner to corner. Yet I found the work surprisingly haunting for a range of unexpected and difficult to explain reasons.

Firstly it is not unlike the work of Giorgio De Chirico, those eternal melancholic empty spaces, the girl with the hoop crossing an empty piazza, the loggia curtain blown open somehow without wind, the endless silence, the breath drawing stillness. Here instead of the classical Italian urban cityscape Georgia O’Keeffe applies similar techniques to the vast open landscapes of the American southwest. Both are painted as stage sets, a stylised empty eternity in which to experience total solitude.

Second was a reference to the surrealist’s with juxtaposed images at changing scales, a petal, a horse skull and a mountain all laid on top of one another. Unlike the surrealist work where the juxtapositions are part of a deliberate means of communication here the juxtapositions are incidental to the totality of the painting that is of one thing, the landscape. Within the vast barren landscapes the blossom, the horse’s skull and the distant mountain range are of equal value and sit together balanced within the composition.

Thirdly the overtly female sensuality of all of the paintings, they are not erotic but corporeal, bodily. The curves are female, of which creases in skin, folds in a torso can be seen in mountain ranges, rivers and ravines or blossoms. There is a closeness and an intimacy, a simplistic understanding reduced to the essence of colour and form, a sexual confidence expressed as if all is female.

Fourth Georgia O’Keeffe lived an incredible life outside of the context of her time. Her work shows no reference to The Great Depression, two World Wars, The Cold War, it is as if none of these existed in her blissful serene New Mexico hacienda, with her full time gardener and cook. It is almost as if no-one else on the planet exists just her and her beloved landscape and you can feel the love for the adobe and the locale with its endless plains, its sunsets and its native laws. She was an incredibly elegant woman with a prairie style similar to that explored by Ralph Lauren but here it meets the Hispanic Native Indian. She was confident and independent a true woman of the 1920’s and 30’s living a self-governing and idealised life outside of the system and commentating through painting on all she saw, an envious position indeed with her life on the desert plain under the lilac New Mexico sky.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s work was hauntingly intriguing but her life was extraordinary.

The Surrogate Twin