Upon hearing the names of Arthur Dove or Marsden Hartley, the saturated colors and organically askew lines of those painters’ landscapes may appear before your mind’s eye. But unless you have a special interest in American modernists of the early twentieth century, they probably don’t. The name Georgia O’Keeffe, by contrast, can hardly fail to bring a few images even to the mind of the strictly casual art appreciator: New Mexican mesas, animal skulls, and above all flowers in extreme close-up. Apart from the artistic skill and distinctive vision with which she created it, O’Keeffe’s work persists in the wider culture because of how well it happens to reproduce in a variety of contexts, including postcards, mugs, and even apparel, such as that sold at her eponymous museum in Santa Fe.
Keeping such products around is, of course, no substitute for seeing the real thing; in their physical reality, O’Keeffe’s paintings have a way of rebuffing all the interpretations with which they’ve been freighted for more than a century now. If you can’t make it out to New Mexico, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has been working to make every single one of her pieces (including sculptures and photographs) available for viewing online at a just-launched portal called Access O’Keeffe.
The museum describes it as a “user-friendly, searchable website with high-resolution images, visual descriptions, exhibition histories, archival materials, and research data associated with the artist’s two-volume catalogue raisonné.” The site’s visitors “can browse by color, shape, or medium, explore the context of works created before and after a specific painting, trace historic exhibitions, create lists of favorites, and download images.”
Access O’Keeffe makes it easy to find the artist’s most famous paintings, but also works that may surprise viewers who only know her mesas, skulls, and flowers. Take, for example, such nocturnally themed canvases as her early Starlight Night, from 1917, or her late Untitled (City Night), from the nineteen-seventies. O’Keeffe’s America, we must remember, isn’t limited to the desert: though she did spend most of her nearly century-long life’s second half in New Mexico, it also took her from Wisconsin to Virginia to Texas to New York, with stints in South Carolina and Hawaii. Given the importance of understanding any artist’s contexts both geographical and social, Access O’Keeffe also provides an archive of artifacts and exhibitions related to the people and organizations associated with her — Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley included.
Related content:
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman
How Georgia O’Keeffe Became Georgia O’Keeffe: An Animated Video Tells the Story
The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips
Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe
Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at “The Father of Modern Photography”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
