A Vision of Steely Finesse

By ROBERT HUGHES

"My first memory is of the brightness of light, light all around," the painter wrote as she was approaching her 90s. She had been nine months old, sitting among white pillows outside her parents' farmhouse in the wheat country near Sun Prairie, Wis.; the Civil War had ended less than 25 years before, the Ford was not invented, and Picasso was six. That infant memory of brightness would irradiate her work for the best part of a century, leaving no doubt, when Georgia O'Keeffe died last week in Santa Fe at the age of 98, that one of the great American lives had ended.

O'Keeffe's career was unique in the annals of American art, for several combining reasons. The first, and most obvious, was its length. It embraced the whole history of modernism in America. Between 1916, when a friend took a bundle of her drawings to Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 Gallery in New York City, and 1976, when encroaching blindness forced her to more or less give up painting, O'Keeffe remained either a vivid presence or, in her later years of isolation on her ranch in Abiquiu, N. Mex., a formidable and revered absence.

The second was its tenacious originality. O'Keeffe was as thoroughly American as Joan Miro -- whose clarity and depth of space her work sometimes distantly recalled -- was Catalan; her paintings remind those sated with cross-cultural quotation that major art is more apt to spring from deep allegiances to specific experience than from isms. She did not go to Europe until she was 65. When she saw Mont Ste.-Victoire from Cezanne's studio above Aix-en-Provence, she characteristically called it "a poor little mountain" -- which it is, in a way, compared with the landscapes that surround her Ghost Ranch -- and wondered why so many words had been piled on it. Before her 30th birthday, in small watercolors of epic space like Light Coming on the Plains, 1917, she had become seraphically modernist without imitating cubism, fauvism or any other transatlantic recipes.

With O'Keeffe, vision preceded style, and her works escape the provincial air that clings to some early American modernism ("Colonial Cubism," in Stuart Davis' mordant phrase). Her main stylistic affinities are less with other American or European painting than with photography: the work of Stieglitz, but especially of her friends Paul Strand and Edward Weston, obsessed with sharp focus, clear emblematic shapes of stone, bone and weathered root, the far telescoped into the near. Her America was a more stripped, fundamental and varied place than anything one can find in "regional" painting of the '30s. She made indelible images of the city, such as her views of and from the Shelton Hotel in New York City in the '20s, which convey the hard-edged, Promethean power of Manhattan. O'Keeffe spent part of every year in New York City until 1949, but the landscape she made most completely her own, through more than 50 years of scrutiny and reverie, was that of New Mexico. She went there for the first time in 1929, and it never let her go. The windy space, the towering cloud architecture, the wrinkled hills "like a mile of elephants," as she once put it, and the reduction of all organic form to sweeping, compressed epitomes lend her paintings something of the grandeur of 19th century panoramic landscapes.

O'Keeffe always rejected the idea that her scenes of New Mexico were meant as symbols or allegories. But it is hard to see their contrasts of image -- an Indian paintbrush or a wild daisy put against the bleached bone of a ram's skull, and that bone repeating the ancient permanence of mountain line -- without grasping that some transaction beyond the simply formal or factual is afoot. This is particularly true with her flower paintings: magnified closeups, filling the whole surface, of a black iris, a jack-in-the-pulpit, or a calla lily. Almost from the moment that they were first exhibited at Stieglitz's gallery in the mid-'20s, these were interpreted as sexually coded images, and since O'Keeffe is now one of the icons of feminism, this reading is unlikely to change. She always denied it, with asperity. But then, she had to make her way in a world more prudish than our own, and one infinitely less receptive to the seriousness of women artists. One way to resist such pressures was to emphasize the formal and botanical over the symbolic and sexual. "I am not a woman painter," she once declared in a famous statement; her life's work was a sustained manifesto against second- class aesthetic citizenship.

Alfred Stieglitz, who was to become her mentor, promoter, lover and husband and who, with her, would enact one of the great partnerships of American culture, grasped the other side of this immediately. "At last," he exclaimed on seeing her drawings in 1916, "a woman on paper!" For in the last analysis, one cannot imagine the peculiar sensibility of her work -- its steely finesse and suppleness, its imagery of blossoming, unfolding and embrace -- coming with such conviction, or perhaps at all, from a man. O'Keeffe was a woman of exquisite moral vigor. Now that she is dead, no effort will be spared to convert her into a mere culture heroine. In the gap between her death and this banal transfiguration, one can at least look at her paintings.