'Georgia O'Keeffe: The Brightness of Light' documentary illuminates the artist's NM connection

New York brought Georgia O’Keeffe fame. New Mexico brought her freedom.

Among the multiple documentaries created about her, none have given the iconic artist the full biographical treatment, complete with massive research, the artist’s letters and the cooperation of her namesake museum.

“I can’t think of another project, at least not in my tenure” where the museum has cooperated so fully with a filmmaker, said Cody Hartley, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

'Georgia O'Keeffe: The Brightness of Light' documentary illuminates the artist's NM connection

“It was a rare opportunity to support a theatrical documentary,” he said.

“It’s beautifully produced and filmed. They secured the participation of nearly every major scholar in the last 40 years. All these voices are featured. They got an interview with her at Ghost Ranch that I had never seen before. For me, it was very powerful.

“They had Claire Danes do the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe,” Hartley continued. “I’ve seen people try to act the part of Georgia O’Keeffe, and it’s very hard to get it right. She used her own voice in a way that feels right. I hope that it reaches a broad and a new audience.”

So maintains Paul Wagner, co-producer of “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light.” The film is set to debut at the Santa Fe International Film Festival on Saturday, Oct. 19, and Sunday, Oct. 20, at the city’s Center for Contemporary Art and the New Mexico History Museum, respectively. Danes voices O’Keeffe; Hugh Dancy is the narrator.

The documentary gestated for five years, shooting at locations in northern New Mexico, New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia.

The film addresses all the signature O’Keeffe motifs: the famous flowers, the charcoal drawings, the New York skyscrapers and the near abstractions.

“People are so stuck on the flowers,” Wagner said. “They never realized the subject matter is much more diverse.”

The artist grew up on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O’Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at New York’s Art Students League, where she learned the techniques of traditional painting. The direction of her artistic practice shifted dramatically four years later when she studied the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow offered O’Keeffe an alternative to established ways of thinking about art. She experimented with abstraction for two years while she taught art in West Texas. Through a series of abstract charcoal drawings, she developed a personal language to better express her feelings and ideas.

O’Keeffe mailed some of these drawings to a friend in New York City. Her friend showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and renowned photographer, who would eventually become O’Keeffe’s husband. He was the first to exhibit her work in 1916.

An Emmy- and Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Wagner “stumbled into” O’Keeffe’s world when he saw the 2018 “O’Keeffe in Charlottesville” exhibit at the University of Virginia.

O’Keeffe studied at UVA every summer from 1912 to 1916, taking courses designed for art teachers and teaching some classes of her own.

When she arrived, she was nearly ready to give up on art, lacking inspiration and struggling to work through her family’s financial struggles and, later, her mother’s death. The family had sold their Wisconsin farm and moved to Virginia.

“Georgia’s father had a lot of problems with his business,” Wagner said. “Her mother had T.B. (tuberculosis).

“Her sisters were signed up for an art class and they were crazy about the instructor and begged Georgia to take the class,” Wagner added.

O’Keeffe had already taken classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Art Students League. Her parents could not afford to send her back.

After much persuasion, O’Keeffe relented and attended her sisters’ class. She also studied the artistic ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow taught that rather than copying nature, artists should create through line, mass and color.

“She was blown away,” Wagner said. “It pointed her in a new direction.

“It became all about what you do with the surface of the painting,” Wagner said. “It opened the door to abstraction.”

In early June 1918, O’Keeffe moved to New York from Texas after Stieglitz promised he would provide her with a quiet studio where she could paint. Within a month, he took the first of many nude photographs of her at his family’s apartment while his wife Emmy was away.

“Stieglitz promoted the sexual interpretation” of her flower paintings, Wagner said. O’Keeffe hated the marketing.

“He was the central force behind the modern art world,” Wagner said. “He was bringing Picasso and Cézanne to New York.”

In New York, O’Keeffe painted the buildings, including the Shelton Hotel, where she and Stieglitz lived from 1925 to 1936. At the time, it was the tallest building in the world.

The couple married in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1924.

“She didn’t want to marry him in the first place,” Wagner said. “He was kind of a 19th century man.”

When the couple came to the ferry to return to New York, “They hit a telephone pole and she injured her leg,” Wagner said. “She says, ‘I almost broke my leg the day we got married.’ She never considered changing her name.”

“He was a brilliant guy,” Wagner said of Stieglitz, adding, but “he was a classic male jerk. He was 24 years older, and he was famous. The mentorship was all tangled with romance.”

Wagner speculated that O’Keeffe’s enlarged flower paintings grew from her association with Stieglitz and his cadre of photographers.

“They were doing close-ups,” he said. “You abstracted it. She was thinking along these same lines and placed her eye right into the flower.”

In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape, and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in her art. For the next two decades, she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico. She made the state her permanent home in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.

Although Stieglitz’s affair with another woman had initially spurred the move, O’Keeffe had always loved the West, Wagner said.

When she visited Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, she discovered a hotbed of creative expression.

“She says, ‘I’m finding myself here,’” Wagner said. “You can see this is an incredible turning point in her life.”

O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98.

Her life “opens a door on women in America and art in America,” Wagner said. “Her life spans almost the entire century.

“She did not consider herself to be a great woman artist but a great artist.”

Wagner is taking the documentary to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 to seek a distributor.

See GeorgiaOKeeffeFilm.com for more information.