As a child growing up in Wisconsin and later in Williamsburg, Georgia O’Keefe showed real promise. She planned to be a painter, and training at the time was tied to 19th century European art. Paul Wagner, who along with his wife Ellen has made a documentary about O’Keeffe, explains.
“Here’s a bowl of fruit. Paint the bowl of fruit. Make it look like a bowl of fruit on your canvas.”
O'Keeffe explained her decision to quit in a letter.
“In school I was taught to paint things as I saw them, but it seemed so stupid. If one could only reproduce nature and always with less beatify than the original, why paint at all?”
She moved to Charlottesville where her mother opened a boarding house and took a summer class with a professor who had studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at Columbia. Again filmmaker Paul Wagner.
“Dow had studied Asian art that didn’t try to represent the world as it actually was in the world but represented the artist’s impressions of that world. What was important was what was on the canvas, and the question of was it beautiful and an authentic expression of the artist?”
That summer she came back to art with colorful paintings of the UVA campus.
“When you compare it with what she had done previously," Wagner says, "you can see the beginnings of this new Georgia O’Keeffe.”
She got some teaching jobs and began working in charcoal -- drawing. A friend was so knocked out by the work that she took it to Alfred Stieglitz – a famous photographer in New York and the owner of a prominent gallery.
In the film – Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, historians describe his reaction.
“They were some of the most innovative things in American art at the time, and they overwhelmed Stieglitz when he saw them. I mean he was absolutely overtaken with them," says Barbara Buhler Lynes.
"He says these are the finest, purest, most sincere drawings I have ever seen," adds Roxana Robinson, "and you say they’re by a woman!”
She was 30 and Stieglitz was 54, but they became lovers and would eventually marry. In 1929 O’Keeffe went to see a friend in Taos, New Mexico, and in letters to Stieglitz it was clear she was wowed by the western landscape.
“This morning, blistering cold, I started for the canyon," she wrote. "It was all rough, but it was great. It’s all so big. I love it. I love it. I feel rough and wild like the wind tonight. I’d like to take hold of you and handle you rather roughly, because I like you!"
All total, there were 25,000 pages of letters that gave filmmakers Paul and Ellen Wagner a new understanding of O’Keeffe. In them she shared intimate details.
"You would laugh at my room – perfectly bare. You’d laugh, too, at what I’ve been doing," said one letter. "I don’t know whether to tell you or not. I couldn’t get what I wanted any other way, so I’ve been painting myself – no clothes."
Some say O’Keeffe was bi-sexual, but the film doesn’t spend much time on that subject – deferring to the artist’s biographer Roxana Robinson.
"I think she was somebody who was independent socially and sexually, and if she had been inclined to have a relationship with a woman, I’m sure she would have. I just didn’t find any evidence that she had."
There is an earlier film about O’Keeffe – one that was made in 1977, but Paul Wagner says it was incomplete – telling her story from late in life.
"In everyone’s mind she’s kind of a charmingly cranky older woman. You know, super smart, still very lucid and very funny," Paul Wagner explains.
Ellen Wagner found earlier footage in the Museum of Modern Art’s archive.
"Everybody always said of Georgia O’Keeffe: She always wore black, and she never wore make-up. In the ’64 film she’s dressed in a turquoise dress, and she’s got lipstick and eyeliner on."
Advance tickets for the documentary at the Virginia Film Festival are sold out, but organizers say there will likely be stand-by tickets available Sunday at 11 in Culbreth Hall.
