Exhibitions featuring the life and art of women abound in New York at this time, a happy coincidence. Especially fine is the Brooklyn Museum’s “Living Modern,” devoted to the oeuvre and style of Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist had her first solo exhibition at the museum in 1927, organized by Alfred Stieglitz and featuring 15 paintings. The current show, consisting of paintings, sculpture, and photographs of O’Keeffe by some of the most well known photographers of the twentieth century, Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Ansel Adams, Cecil Beaton to name a few, also displays her clothing. An excellent seamstress, as the accompanying catalogue makes clear, she made her own dresses, blouses, shirtwaists, and coats, and also collected simple, architecturally structured designs from the Japanese. Her Lee overalls and plaid shirts are fashionable today. Maria Chabot’s photo of the artist has her posed on a dusty road at Ghost Ranch, hair pulled back, in a woven checked shirt and loose jeans. In Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of O’Keeffe from 1980, she looks stern, her face naturally wrinkled as would befit a woman of unselfconscious, ageless beauty, at 92.
Serendipitous to the Brooklyn Museum show is the publication of Assouline’s book of photographs by Robyn Lea, Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe: Recipes, Art & Landscape. Copiously researched, this volume is at once a history and a cookbook of the American southwest where O’Keeffe resided. One 1961 photo (it’s at the Brooklyn Museum too) is by Tony Vaccaro: Seated in a car, the artist holds something up to her eye. Turns out she is looking through a hole in a Swiss cheese slice. O’Keeffe favored whole grains, and home garden grown vegetables, before that became a trend. One of the great joys of this book are quotations from O’Keeffe’s letters: “A cook book can be very entertaining. I intended reading about string beans but I read about spaghetti instead. I always feel so hopeful that things will taste good when I read about them. So I am going to have spaghetti instead of oatmeal for supper.”
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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