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Coming full circle: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum exhibition sheds light on a shape
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Georgia O’Keeffe’s career is bookended by circles.
She drew and painted them often in the 1910s, then in 1946 abandoned the motif, didn’t draw or paint them for nearly three decades, then brought them back in the 1970s, near the end of her career.
That’s the timeline Yaritza Martinez Pule presents in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s exhibition, “A Circle that Nothing Can Break,” Pule’s solo curatorial debut. She got the idea for the show when she saw a watercolor of a circle in the museum’s archive, which she assumed was from O’Keeffe’s early career, only to discover, to her astonishment, that it was from the 1970s.
Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of shows that take a matchy-matchy approach to curation, where the theme is something like “the color red” or “square paintings” or, in this case, “circles.” That’s what I thought this exhibition was about when I first glanced at the press release and the images. But it’s much more than that.
Pule connects the appearance and disappearance of the circle motif to major events in the artist’s life. It can hardly be a coincidence, after all, that O’Keeffe stopped painting circles in 1946, the year her husband, the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, died.
It’s equally meaningful that O’Keeffe returns to the circle late in her career, although the reasons for that return are a bit more uncertain. Pule suggests O’Keeffe’s declining health — including significant vision loss and a pronounced hand tremor — would have impaired her ability to keep painting in her previous, mature style, which I’m sure is true. Pule also implies that returning to “familiar gestural strokes” may have been comforting and therapeutic for the artist, which is probably true, too.
An additional possible reason for the return could be that O’Keeffe had just been given a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. It’s common for artists, in preparing for a retrospective, to uncover works from decades earlier that they’d completely forgotten about, and, with the benefit of temporal distance, find renewed inspiration in long-lost ideas. Because O’Keeffe was honored with a career retrospective at the Whitney, the decision of what to include likely weighed even heavier. The spontaneous rediscovery of earlier drawings and paintings could have easily inspired the later works.
“A Circle that Nothing Can Break” is a small, one-room show, almost entirely comprised of works on paper. But the central idea of the show is huge. And the mystery of what prompted O’Keeffe’s late return to circles is compelling.
There is a looseness to the ’70s-era watercolors on paper that’s absent from her earlier circle motif pieces, which were much more precise. And, while we know O’Keeffe was experiencing a physical decline, the blending and bleeding together of colors in these late works seems fairly purposeful. Scrutinizing the works up close, I see O’Keeffe choosing different size brushes, mixing slightly different hues and making multiple overlapping marks.
Within this overarching matrix of authorial choice and control, though, O’Keeffe encourages happy accidents, using what look like the stain painting techniques of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. In other words, O’Keeffe appears to be integrating contemporaneous developments in post-painterly abstraction even as she harkens back to her own early-career work.
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One rare early drawing included in the show, which was never exhibited in O’Keeffe’s lifetime, depicts a rather cartoonish set of breasts inside an oval frame reminiscent of an abalone shell. Although it’s a fascinating drawing — and it’s great to see the museum putting rarely-seen works on view — it was a bit of a jolt to encounter it in what I had expected to be a completely non-figurative show.
If you’re the type of museum-goer who likes to look at the art without reading the text panels — as I sometimes do — this drawing is a red herring, which might lead to a misunderstanding of O’Keeffe’s work, and Pule’s thesis. Pule is definitely not saying that the circles in O’Keeffe’s work signify breasts. In fact, to the extent that the late-career circles are connected to the artist’s body at all, it’s the hands and arms of the artist that act as repositories of muscle memory, allowing bodily remembered gestures to become form and color.
“A Circle that Nothing Can Break” is a show that’s easy to overlook, or to glance through too quickly and think, “Oh, I get it. Circles.” But there’s a lot of complexity in this one-room work-on-paper show. Pule’s historical research is solid and compelling, and the art is much richer and more complex than it first appears.
